Resetting OS X Yosemite Setup Assistant

I’ve been searching for this all afternoon! The old way of resetting the OS X setup assistant via single-user mode and directory services dscl no longer works in Yosemite (and possibly Mountain Lion and Mavericks; I haven’t tried it since Lion). I discovered a new way by running across this engadget post. I modified step 5 to include the users folder. Here’s a quick summary:

  1. Boot into single-user mode by holding down Command-S on the keyboard during startup
  2. At the command-line prompt, type mount -uw /
  3. rm -R /Library/Preferences
  4. rm -R /Users/YOURUSERNAME/ <– replace YOURUSERNAME with whatever your user name is
  5. cd /var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/users
  6. ls (to list the files)
  7. Delete the file that is named after your user account with a .plist extension. For example, for user name “stevesande” you’d type rm stevesande.plist
  8. rm /private/var/db/.AppleSetupDone
  9. reboot

For my purposes, I omitted step 3 and everthing worked fine.

Creating a USB installer for OS X Yosemite Beta

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Some people have ran into a problem with creating a bootable USB installer for the Yosemite Beta. The script located in the Installer app called “createinstallmedia” does not work quite yet on Yosemite like it did in Mavericks. I kept getting an error that told me my volume wasn’t a valid mount point.

After doing some research, I came across a post on MacRumors.com that had a workaround. Just run the following commands in Terminal and you’ll be good to go!

sudo hdiutil attach /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ 10.10\ Developer\ Preview.app/Contents/SharedSupport/InstallESD.dmg
sudo asr restore -source /Volumes/OS\ X\ Install\ ESD/BaseSystem.dmg -target /Volumes/Untitled -erase -format HFS+
sudo rm /Volumes/OS\ X\ Base\ System/System/Installation/Packages
sudo cp -a /Volumes/OS\ X\ Install\ ESD/Packages /Volumes/OS\ X\ Base\ System/System/Installation/Packages
sudo cp -a /Volumes/OS\ X\ Install\ ESD/BaseSystem.dmg /Volumes/OS\ X\ Install\ ESD/BaseSystem.chunklist /Volumes/OS\ X\ Base\ System

Make sure to change “/Volumes/Untitled” to the correct name of the disk you are trying to install it on!

Happy OS beta testing!