Format Mac without deleting hard drive

Learn how to “fiddle with your Mac” without having to go through the process of reinstalling the operating system

Having the Mac as clean as possible is something that any of its owners are looking for. It is important that the performance of our equipment is adequate so that when we work with them we feel comfortable. To have the Mac ready, the best thing is to do a clean installation of the system by creating and running a USB Boot . This process removes and reinstalls the operating system so that it runs from scratch providing the Mac with a set up.

• How to change the format of an external hard drive for Macbook Time Machine Backup
• How to Format a Disk in MacBook Air and Mac OS Sierra or High Sierra
• How to create or delete partitions in MacBook Air, Os Sierra and OS X with Disk Utility
• How to Make an External Hard Drive Partition on Mac
• How to create macOS Sierra hard drive partitions
• Format Mac without deleting hard drive
• Disk Utility for macOS Sierra: Protect a disk with password with Disk Utility
• Create fusion drive sierra | create fusion drive with recovery partition
• How to Partition a Hard Drive to Avoid Losing data on Mac and Windows
• Create a second partition on a Macbook disk without losing data
• Disk Utility for macOS Sierra: Create partitions on a physical disk with Disk Utility
• Disk Utility for MacOS Sierra: Erase a Volume with Disk Utility
• Repair the hard drive if your Mac does not boot

But this is not the only option available to Mac users. There is a possibility to remove the administrator without losing our information. That is to say, it is a kind of formatting, but with the difference that we will avoid removing and reinstalling the operating system and therefore we will not delete the OS from the hard disk. It is important to have a backup made to ensure we do not lose the data in any of the cases before beginning this process.

 

The first thing we must do as we have already explained, is to make a backup and thus to have safe all that data that can not be important. It is interesting to know that all those documents and files that we have outside the folder of our user (administrator) are not going to be deleted during this process.

 

The first step is to go to the “System Preferences” – “users and groups”. Once here, we have to unlock the padlock that we can find in the lower left corner.

 

When we have it unlocked, the next thing we must do is create a new Administrator account. For this we have to click on the “+” symbol and assign the privileges.

 

Now that we have our new account created, we have to restart the Mac and log in from the new Administrator account. This way the Mac will never be left without Administrator since we will have two Administrator accounts at that time.

 

Now that we have restarted it we go back to “System Preferences” – “users and groups” and select the lock again to open it. On this occasion, we must enter the new password set for the Administrator.

 

Once we have completed all of the above steps, the next thing is to delete the old Administrator account . To do this we have to place ourselves on top and select the “-“ symbol in the upper left corner.

 

You must select the option that interests you, in this case the administrator account, and perform the deletion. Be sure to do the process well.

 

This way we will have a new administrator created in a clean way and without having to reinstall the operating system. In the event that we decide that we want to format the Mac and return it to its factory state, we can also do it following the steps that are detailed in the following tutorial.