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.

Warning: OS X Yosemite uses Core Storage for partitions

Core StorageMany users around the net have been realizing after installing the OS X Yosemite beta the partitions on their hard drive were converted to Logical Volumes. I’m not entirely sure why Apple chose to do this, but it makes resizing and deleting partitions on the fly 10x harder! I haven’t found a good solution as of this writing, but make sure you are aware of this!

Apple introduced “Core Storage” with the release of OS X 10.7 Lion. All Fusion drives use Core Storage. A Fusion drive is pretty much just an SSD and traditional spinning hard drive combined into one logical drive. Normally these drives would show up separately, but with the help of Core Storage, they can be turned into one logical volume. It’s possible to create your own Fusion Drive with a separate SSD and HDD by using Core Storage. There are a few tutorials around the web that can help with this. I’ve created 3 of my own “Fusion Drives” using these guides.

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!