If you have been in the Mac world for a while, it is sure that on more than one occasion you had to reinstall the operating system either because a new generation has arrived or because you have had a software problem. Surely you’ve heard several times that the best way to reinstall the operating system on Mac is through a bootable ‘pendrive’, but it can also be done without an external storage unit as we will tell you below.
Formatting and reinstalling macOS on Mac
Whenever a new version of the operating system for Mac comes out that is relevant, such as the jump from Mojave to Catalina we recommend doing a clean installation . With this we mean to erase the entire hard disk and install the software from scratch to avoid dragging errors.
The most common way to do this installation is through a USB pendrive that we boot in a simple way through Terminal. But even the most common is not the only one. We can also use the software that includes the Mac itself to perform this reinstallation. Simply follow these steps:
- We turn off the Mac completely.
- When pressing on the power button, we must press and hold the Command + R keys . Do not stop pressing them until a loading bar comes out under the Apple logo.
- When the load concludes, we will be in the macOS utilities.
- Among the different options that appear on the screen, click on ‘Disk Utility’. Here we can erase all the information on our hard drive, that is, format it and leave it as new. To do this we simply have to select the unit in the left sidebar and move to the ‘Delete’ option found at the top. We recommend you format it with the APFS file format.
- Once this disk formatting is done, we can close this window.
- Again we will see the previous utility menu and in this case we will select ‘Reinstall macOS’. Now if not, the macOS installation software that is available at that time will be released. It is important to have a stable and private internet connection to be able to perform this download in a safe and efficient way.
As you can see, you don’t need any external device to be able to format the Mac and leave it as new. This is an operation that, as we say, should be carried out at least once a year, coinciding with the arrival of the new versions of the operating system. Although it can also be useful when a software problem occurs, this being
Obviously before starting this process, you should make a backup of all the files in addition to making sure you do not need the Mac in a couple of hours. While downloading, installing and restoring all files is going to pass the time quite quickly.
