This is absolutely brilliant thanks Paul. Much appreciated. Jonathan Mosen Mosen Consulting Blindness technology eBooks, tutorials and training http://Mosen.org
On 22/09/2013, at 9:02 PM, Paul Erkens <paul.erk...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi Jonathan, > > Yes, the process is accessible. I assume you won't need the details below, > but I'm writing them down for anyone interested. > If you start up your mac and you hear the initial sound right after turning > it on, then press and hold both command and the letter r while the sound is > still playing. Hold for some 5 seconds and then let go. The mac will boot > from its hidden recovery partition, instead of its normal boot partition. It > depends on a few factors how long it takes to boot, but after 30 seconds or > so, just start pressing VO plus f5 with an interval of a few seconds, until > VoiceOver comes on. It should not take longer than 3 minutes on a slow > machine. You won't hear Alex, it will be Fred. You can now take it from there. > > Fred will speak very quietly, but you can crank it up a little bit using the > normal mac volume control with f12 or fn f12, and also the usual voice > controls will work as well if you hold down command, then going to volume > using left or right arrows, and then increasing volume with the up arrow key. > > You'll see an interactable table with some choices, one of which is to > reinstall OS10. > If you prefer, you could first wipe the Macintosh HD partition using disk > utility. Disk utility is in the interactable table as well. > > If you have an SSD drive and you did not encrypt your drive, then there is a > good chance that some of your stuff is still somewhere on the drive. > > This is of course true for a normal hard disk if you just wipe out its > partition table, but even more so for an SSD, because of a mechanism called > wear leveling. What that means is that if you, for example, were using your > SSD for just a few files, wipe it, rewrite a few files, wipe it etc, you > would only use the first bit of memory on the SSD. Because those chips have a > finite number of writes, it would wear out the first bit of the drive, and > render it unusable rather quickly. To overcome this, new SSD's have wear > leveling, where new stuff is written to new locations on the SSD all the > time. This means that we as a user, cannot tell where specific stuff is being > stored on the SSD, making it impossible to wipe out stuff on an SSD, as you > would from a traditional hard drive. I got this bit of useful knowledge from > Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte's podcast: security now. Their advice: when you > start using a new SSD, make sure encryption is on before you add your > personal stuff. > > Also, Don't forget to unauthorize your old machine from itunes before > reinstalling it, and if I remember well, there are a few other useful steps > to take when selling or giving away an older mac. Apple has an article on it. > > With a macbook air, I would like to warn you for a situation that I ran into, > while helping someone else do it over facetime. I only experienced the > following just once. > > First a note on wifi. After you boot from the recovery partition, you'll have > to connect to wifi, but the status menus are not available with voiceover. > The wifi stuff is indeed available to us, but it is in the normal pulldown > menus, I think it was under utilities. Once connected, you should be able to > proceed normally, and accessibly. > > Should, because here came the problem. You have to give your Apple ID to have > the mac check for its eligibility to redownload the OS. Even though the ID > was cprrect, we were hitting continue forever. The button did not go disabled > as you would expect, so then you want to hit it again. However, things would > not advance from then on, and she had to take her machine into an Apple store > to have it fixed. Unfortunately, they did not explain how they fixed it, so I > can't tell you either. > > However, on my machine, I never had a problem reinstalling OS10. Hope that > helps. > > Paul. > On Sep 22, 2013, at 9:19 AM, Jonathan Mosen <jmo...@mosen.org> wrote: > >> Hi everyone, I normally don't mind experimenting with things but I am a bit >> chicken to take this one on without asking for people's experiences. >> I have just upgraded from a 2012 Macbook Air to a 2013, and want to restore >> my old machine to the state it originally came in, IE erase all my data and >> leave a fresh copy of the OS on the system. >> I've read about starting the Mac while holding the option key and selecting >> the recovery partition. My question is, is this an accessible process? If >> so, at what point can I turn VoiceOver on? Is it just a case of pressing >> down-arrow, then return, to get to the recovery partition? Any help, or a >> URL that explains all this from a blindness perspective, would be very much >> appreciated. Thanks a lot. >> Jonathan Mosen >> Mosen Consulting >> Blindness technology eBooks, tutorials and training >> http://Mosen.org >> >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "MacVisionaries" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >> email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. >> To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. >> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "MacVisionaries" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. 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