I erased by entire disk accidentally on my iMac, panicked on doing a clean install on my mac. I could not start a system by pressing CMD+R neither holding OPT worked. Why? because there is nothing in my disk to boot. All i had to think was how can install fresh mac osx from my usb stick. So that made me to download Macosx Yosemite about 5GB to my old macbook laptop running snow leopard 10.6.
After about 6 hours of downloading (sorry slow connection), i found the big yosemite install file sitting in my app folder. To get things started i purchased 32gb usb disk and erased it naming the volume as ‘macosx’ then issued this command
sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Yosemite.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/macosx --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Yosemite.app
Nope it didnt work, gave -999 error, turns out i need to have mavericks for this to run. Had to resort to another way. Fortunately there is a free third party app DiskmakerX, that can create a usb boot disk for mavericks, lion, yosemite.
In about 20 mins, i was able to create my boot installer and my erased iMac is up and running with the installer. Wonderful, sigh of relief!
