I have an older MacBook Air that I want to get back to its factory-fresh state. The trouble is that the Air doesn’t have a DVD drive and the older Airs came with a couple of DVDs. So, Remote Installing to the rescue. See the exact instructions on this older blog post: http://www.seqmedia.com/?p=103
After the long setup, wouldn’t it also be nice if you installed all the iLife software that came with the Mac too? Well, you can! You’ll need to:
- Create a test user with a short test password. (You MUST create a password.)
- Skip through the registration process just to get by the prompts.
- When you’re back at your desktop, use the Remote Disc to get back to your other computer and pop in the Applications Install DVD. Install all the apps.
- Now to erase that test account and bring back the fun startup video, thanks to MacWorld:
- Restart the computer.
- Hold down Command+S during boot to enter single-user mode.
-
Set the mounted root disk back into write mode:
mount -uw /
Note: You might note that the instructions printed on the screen say you should fsck. You probably should. I haven’t and it has still worked fine.
- Remove the system configuration (leaving the iLife apps plist files alone):
rm -rf /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration
- Remove your test user account:
rm -rf /Users/TESTUSER
- Remove the usernames plist:
rm /var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/users/TESTUSER.plist
- Remove the setup info plist:
rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone
- Restart the system with a command:
reboot
(If you don’t want to bother installing the iApps you can just Command+Q at the welcome screen. See Hivelogic’s article.)