Clean install Mountain Lion - best method?

[TangoJuliet]

So I went ahead and got the SSD. I made a bootable usb key with mountain lion and installed it on the bare drive.

I skipped the option of transferring my data from the old drive and was just going to do it all manually. Then I realized how much of a pain in the butt and time consuming it was going to be.

I read online that you can import your files and as long as you don't have it keep the same settings it will still be a clean install. So I formatted the SSD again, installed ML and when prompted imported my files from the old hdd.

Is this the best way going about this? Everything seems to be working nice and fast.

 

[Kaido]

I go a bit of an easier route - the USB key method is easiest for fresh installs, but since Mountain Lion is universal on all Macs, you can make a master image (Norton Ghost-style) and then restore that to new drives (Mac & Hackintoshes aliike) So basically:

1. Install Mountain Lion to a small partition (like 10 gigs or so)
2. Run updates
3. Clone to a sparseimage file (DMG) using SuperDuper

So now you just use SuperDuper to restore the master image and boom, you've got the install and updates ready to go without actually having to walk through the installation procedure (and you can skip registration during install and use a default password like "apple" so you have a generic, non-user-specific image) and run system updates!

I have a USB hard drive dock on my desk (takes 2.5" and 3.5" drives, so I can do laptop drives, desktop drives, and SSD's) and just pop in new drives and restore that that. Makes it really easy to setup new Macs/Hacks really fast. Alternatively, you can make a USB bootable drive with like a $20 32-gig USB stick, install OSX to it, and copy the master image DMG to it. Then just boot the OS from USB (sort of like a live environment type of idea) and use SuperDuper to clone the DMG from the USB to the internal drive. It's not quite as fast as a USB dock (or direct SATA connection if you have that), but it works!

Lots of nice little tricks out there

 

[manly]

you're worrying about it too much. This isn't Windows and an in-place upgrade or account migration isn't going to ruin your new OS image.

Kaido, not that it matters much but you don't like having the Lion recovery partition?

 

[TangoJuliet]

you're worrying about it too much.

tell me about it. It took me years to finally get XP setup in a way that it was perfect every time on a re-install. I switched to mac only about 6 years ago and never did a clean install. It was always a upgrade over an existing OS: Lep, Snow Lep, Lion, ML