0

I would like to perform a clean installation of MacOS Big Sur on my MacBook Air 2017. I've read two articles on how to do this, one said I don't need a USB installer, the other one said it is required. I just want to make sure before I do anything, do I need USB installer or is it possible to download Big Sur from the internet when performing clean installation?

Thank you.

simonugor
  • 123
  • 1
  • 15
  • You should be able to perform internet recovery: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204904 – Oo.oO Feb 06 '21 at 23:31
  • So it should be possible without USB Installer right. Do you have any recommendations if it is better to use it or to perform internet recovery? – simonugor Feb 07 '21 at 00:07

1 Answers1

0

Internet recovery is my first choice for reinstalling OS X. From time to time there are problems with internet recovery. Corrupt recovery partitions, firmware passwords, and a lot of misc hardware problems are what will usually prevent you from using internet recovery.

If you don't have another machine to write your USB installer, I would just make one to be safe. You could also run Apple Diagnostics before running internet recovery to make sure hardware won't be an issue. Out of hundreds of OS X installations I've done, I've only had a handful fail in a way that prevented me from using the original OS afterward, and in those cases it was always a major hardware issue.

Kyle Dixon
  • 474
  • 2
  • 10
  • I will keep that in mind and make an USB installer just in case Internet recovery fails. Thank you for your answer. – simonugor Feb 08 '21 at 14:24