OSX question from a Windows guy

[Andrew Broughton]

So, I have a MBP (new enough to have the Internet Restore capability), and it's set up to dual boot both Mavericks and El Capitan.
Holding the option key when booting gives me 4 choices:
Mavericks disk & matching Recovery disk
El Capitan disk & matching Recovery disk

I want to wipe the Mavericks disk and reinstall a factory-fresh copy of Mavericks, without touching the El Capitan disk of course.
Do I boot to the Mavericks Recovery and format the Mavericks disk?
Do I use the Internet Recovery system?

Never done this before, and the 'net doesn't seem to have a lot of info on what to do when you have it already set up as dual boot, and want to do a clean install of an older OS on a single partition...

 

[Riley Casey]

Re: OSX question from a Windows guy

I'd be curious to see the answer to this myself. At least up to OS 10.8 you needed a separate partition to have a different OS version.

 

[Andrew Broughton]

Re: OSX question from a Windows guy

Figured it out.

1. Hold Option Key while booting.
2. Choose the disk named Recovery 10.9.5 (that's the Mavericks Recovery disk)
3. Select Disk Utility
4. Select the Mavericks partition
5. Select Erase and click Erase...
6. When it finishes, select Reinstall OS X
7. Do the usual installation q & a, after an hour or so, it's done.

Wish Windows was even CLOSE to that easy!

 

[Ben Lawrence]

Re: OSX question from a Windows guy

What do you have programs that only run on one OS or the other? Im trying to think why you would want to do this.

 

[Andrew Broughton]

Re: OSX question from a Windows guy

What do you have programs that only run on one OS or the other? Im trying to think why you would want to do this.

Some programs don't work on El Capitan, like SM (without jumping through some hoops), so I like to have 2 versions so I can test my software on both platforms.