If you’ve tried the ‘Command+R’ shortcut and your Mac is either starting up as normal, or it’s displaying a blank screen, then you may be missing a recovery partition, which is required for booting into Recovery Mode. Sometimes, it may not be possible to boot into Recovery Mode, for example maybe your recovery partition is corrupt, the startup volume has been erased, or you’re reinstalling macOS due to a complete hard drive failure. Is your Mac refusing to boot into Recovery? If you plan to sell your MacBook or pass it along to someone else, then you should quit this wizard so that the new owner can enter their own details. One the installation is complete, the setup wizard will open and you’ll be able to configure your “new” Mac.

Select ‘Reinstall macOS,’ and then click ‘Continue.’.

Your Mac should now boot into Recovery Mode.

Release these buttons as soon as you see the Apple logo.

Restart your Mac while holding down the ‘Command+R’ buttons.

Installing a fresh copy of macOS via Recovery Modeįor the majority of Mac users, reinstalling macOS means booting into Recovery Mode: Once the process is complete, select ‘Quit Disk Utility,’ to return to the main macOS Utilities window.

Disk Utility will now wipe your hard drive.

Select the volume that you want to erase.

If you do decide to wipe the slate clean, then as soon as you encounter the macOS Utilities window, make sure you: In this article, I’ll show you how to reinstall macOS via Recovery Mode, and via Internet Recovery – just in case your Mac is missing a recovery partition! However, regardless of whether you reinstall via Recovery or Internet Recovery, at some point you’ll have access to the macOS Utilities menu, which contains a ‘Disk Utility’ option that you can use to wipe your hard drive. You may even want to consider actively wiping your data before reinstalling macOS, especially if you plan to sell your Mac, or donate it to a lucky friend or relative.

Reinstalling macOS shouldn’t delete your data, but it’s always best to be on the safe side! Before reinstalling the operating system, make sure you’ve backed up any files or data that you want to hang onto.

Wipe disk utility for mac