Totally clean install of Mac OS X

[brettjamesbuckley]

I bought an iMac 27 at the start of the year and didn't get on so went with OS X despite my best efforts. I eventually ended up dual booting Windows 7 and it has remained that way since.

I have decided to try OS X again as I have more time on my hands and so I want to totally wipe the disk and put on a clean install.

However, I did try doing this earlier in the year using the CTRL-R recovery partition. It seemed to work OK at the time, except that when I booted back into my "new install" of OS X, it seemed to have remembered various aspects of the previous install (I know it's not much help but I can't recall exactly what!).

Is the CTRL-R option really a totally clean format and reinstall or just a "refresh" of key files?

 

[Kaveman]

I can't test this but I'm sure it depends which option you choose. You Don't reformat the drive you just Erase the non-restore partition.

 

[brettjamesbuckley]

Thanks for the reply Kaveman.
I did a bit more research and found the same answer as yours on another site also.

I will therefore use the CMD+R option and erase / format all partitions on the drive (except of course for the recovery one!) and hopefully this should return it to the same state as when I bought it.

I should add that I have all of my data fully backed up on external drives.

Thanks...Brett