Start by enter the command below to get a list of partitions. Other commands are used to make the changes. The procedure given in this step does use the diskutil command, but not to make changes to the this drive. However, since you are booted from the recovery volume on the same drive, neither the Disk Utility or diskutil command can be used to successfully make the changes. Normally, the Disk Utility or diskutil command would be used to make the changes. If you get a popup shown below, select the Cancel button.ĭivide partition on the drive where OS X used to reside into two partitions of equal size. See Install gdisk from macOS Recovery in this answer. This would allow me to confirm this solution will work with your Mac. The answer posted by bmike is far simpler and more practice, if your Mac can boot OS X installers from a flash drive and you have another Mac that can install the 'Install OS X El Capitan' application from the InstallMacOSX.dmg file downloaded from Apple.īelow are the steps to install Yosemite on your Mac.īefore following the steps posted below, you probably should post the output from the diskutil list disk0 command so your question. I realize this is a rather lengthly installation procedure. Finally, the Mountain Lion boot and recovery volumes are converted to free space and the Yosemite volume is expanded to reclaim this free space. Basically, you first install Mountain Lion on a new (clean) volume, then use Mountain Lion to install Yosemite on a different new (clean) volume. The two other downloads are OS X installers from Apple. One download is the installer for a third party disk partitioning tool called 'GPT fdisk'. You will need to download free installation files. Since you can boot to OS X Yosemite Recovery, you can install Yosemite without the aid of a DVD, flash drive or another Mac.

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