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Silly John Fatty

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Nov 6, 2012
1,768
493
Found a nice old Mac Pro (the mid 2010 12 core) and they're selling it with a 2TB hard drive. I don't want the HD however, because I do not need it, so I would like to buy it without the HD and install a small SSD myself.

But just wondering, how do I go on about installing OSX then? Is it only possible with installation discs?

I know that on iMacs and such there's a partition of the hard drive that can't be erased which is the OSX recovery partition or something like this. But on a new, empty SSD (or even HD), I'm confused how you have to do this.

Thanks a lot!
 
Last edited:

flowrider

macrumors 604
Nov 23, 2012
7,247
2,967
How will you be starting it up? You can make installation "disks" for the Mac OS on a USB stick of 8GB or larger, instructions are on the web.

Lou
 

Macsonic

macrumors 68000
Sep 6, 2009
1,706
97
Cool thanks guys, never heard of this!

Congrats on your cMac Pro purchase. :) If you're not using the optical drive, you can also place additional SSD or HD in the optical bay area for more storage options. OWC sells a bracket so the SSD or HD can fit well. And later you can install either a SSD PCie for faster transfer speed of SATA 3 and a USB 3 card.
 
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