[Editor’s note: This article is part of our series of articles on installing and upgrading to Lion (OS X 10.7). We also have a complete guide to installing and upgrading to Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8).] ...

Formatting a hard drive along with the install of a new OS is the best option. The vast majority of operating system installations provide a "format" option as part of the installation process.

This article is for people whose Macs came preinstalled with Mavericks. If you can download the Mavericks installer from the Mac App Store, you should instead use our standard instructions for ...

Update: Before you try all of this, you may want to try using WinToFlash, a utility designed to create a bootable Windows flash drive for Windows XP/Vista/7/Server. If this works for you, you can skip ...