Friday, October 16, 2009

How to: Clean install of Snow Leopard on MacBook Air

Finally blocked out some time to do a clean install of Snow Leopard on my MacBook Air. To do a clean install, you have to boot up the Mac with the Snow Leopard DVD. And then use Disk Utility to erase the hard drive.


Since I don't have an external DVD drive, I searched around, and it seems like on Macs, you can run a utility called Remote Install Mac OSX. Here's documentation from Apple. The app is pretty self explanatory and walks you through the entire process.

Beware if you're installing over wi-fi
I also took a look at the PDF guides on the Snow Leopard DVD. It does mention about Remote Install Mac OSX. If you're using AirPort (or via wi-fi), it seems that WEP protected networks don't work. And yes, in my case, I was doing it via wi-fi, and my network happened to be WEP. I left my ethernet cable adapter at the office.

I felt lazy and didn't want to change my Air Port settings, so I decided to share the Internet connection of my iMac without a password. I didn't have any important stuff on the computer, and hopefully my neighbors are all nice people.

In the end, all went fine. It took about two hours I think. Now I just got to restore the settings and get all those apps back in.

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