How To Reinstall Mac Os X Lion Without Disc
Jodee Bouman
My Lion installation ruined. Everything doesn't work. Even my Mac doesn't sleep. I want to reinstall whole OS, but I have no spare backup drive. So I want to reinstall OS without erasing or repartitioning to keep my data on disk.
Reboot your Mac. When you hear the boot chime, hold the COMMAND + R keys. You will enter the Lion Recovery environment. From there, simply choose to reinstall Lion. It will simply remove the current system and replace it with a fresh copy. None of your data will be deleted or moved. The only thing that will be replaced will be the core system files. There is no longer any need to make backups, migrate your data, or mess with partitioning.
Now, if you installed it you can do the brutal cmd-R on boot to get to the recovery partition. That's nice, you can now install Lion via your hopefully working network, as well as wiping the badness from your drive.
We just received a Mac Xserve (donated!) and now I have to find something to do with it. There are personal files scattered all over and a bunch of services running, so I'd like to just reinstall from scratch, but we didn't get any discs with it. And I can't find a place to download Leopard Server from Apple.
An alternative would be to use Lion and Lion server if you use an Intel based machine, which you can download from the Mac App Store. However, to get the download, you will need at least MacOS Snow Leopard, as the App Store is not available for earlier versions of the OS.
Re keys: MacOS Server is the only MacOS variant that uses product keys. You can (and should) get the key from the Server Admin application if you manage to get hands of an Install CD for Leopard Server.
I bought a used MacBook and I wanted to do a factory recovery. I restarted and held down command + R. I went to disk utility and erased Mac OS extended journaled. I restarted and I clicked on reinstall Lion OS. when I click on the hard drive and it states Hard drive Locked, I am unable to do anything.
my mac book pro did not have the option enable journal available to select it was grey, it was there but could not select it, so i externally formatted the hard drive NTFS type, then formatted it again internally with the mac, then started the installation again and it worked (mac lion OS)
I suspect he was able to attach the drive to a Windows system to reformat it the NTFS which got rid of the damaged boot sector. Then with the drive back inside his Mac he was able to reformat the drive using either a OS install DVD the system came with (grey disk) or the retail version. The other way would be using an external bootable OS-X drive (USB, FireWire or Thunderbolt).
I've created a bootable USB thumb drive just for doing this. While slow it does get the job done. On it I have a copy of Disk Utility and the OS installer to then run to prep and install a fresh copy of the OS.
Another option would be connecting your system to the other back to back via a FireWire or Thunderbolt cable and then setting up your system in Target mode that way you would be treating your system as if it were an external HD to the other system saving the effort of pulling the drive out.
@k7004205773083 Please start a new question and give your specifics as an answer here would get lost. Give your exact machine as methods differ and there are different types of locks. The lock discussed here sounds different from yours. A photo of the locked screen really helps.
I am fully aware of all of the ways to change permissions on the drives They all have a custom permission and when I try to change it to specify a user or admin as read and write they all go back to custom, and Yes I unlocked the get info before I tried.
sometimes I wish they would fire all of the nerds that are now in place and hire back the old ones. At least they the old ones had caring about users in mind they tried to solve problems instead of creating them. The New Yosemite and Lion and Montain Lion and Mavericks have done nothing except mess with older computer users and the programs that no longer work. Now all we have are a bunch of I phone idiots walking out into the streets with their eyes glued to their %#*@ phones. Einstein said "We Cannot solve problems using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them"
Sometimes the simplest fix is the answer here. Prep up a bootable USB thumb drive. Then after booting up with it run Apples Disk Utility from the thumb drive. Select your internal drive and run repair permissions and then disk you will likely need to run it a few times. Let us know how it goes, nine out of ten times this fixes things. If not you likely have a drive that's going.
You'll need to disconnect the internal drive so it will boot up via the USB thumb drive. Then go into system prefs Startup Disk alter it to the USB drive now shutdown the system reconnect the internal and reboot that should fix it.
My symptom was it was asking for the password but I couldn't type ANYTHING in the field so I powered off and powered on holding Command + r down for 15 seconds and let go of keys and went into Disk Utility and formatted the drive "journaled" and then was able to reinstall Sierra.
As I've said before, slowing down is not an option for me. At one point, I realized that there were plenty of files on my Mac that I didn't need any more, but too many to delete individually. In other cases, your Mac can be experiencing some major malfunctions: constant crashing, locked controls, slow boot times, missing files, etc.
Often, the best option to fix these problems would be to reformat your computer and reinstall your OS, but since most of us don't plan on ever taking this drastic measure, we don't obtain a recovery disc or thumb drive.
Okay, so you may have a lot of files that you want to get rid of, but you definitely have some files you want to keep. In my case, I even have programs I want to keep so I don't have to re-download them after the process is over.
Click the Reinstall OS X option in the menu and proceed to follow the directions. You will need to be connected to the Internet, so make sure you're plugged in via Ethernet, or are connected to a Wi-Fi network.
You should now have a fresh copy of Mac OS X installed, and your computer is back to its factory settings. All without the need for a recovery disc or thumb drive. If you want to play it safe and create a bootable install drive for Mac OS X, you can do so using our guides here for Lion/Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Yosemite, and El Capitan.
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Thank you, a friend asked me to get a new install OS X and this seems easy, but just one question. in the last step, do we require some sort of key or login to identify that you own the mac? or it auto copies the information from the previous installment?
If my computer originally came with Snow Leopard but has since been upgraded to Mavericks, will I be able to do the factory reset back to Mavericks? Or will it revert all the way back to Snow Leopard, requiring the discs?
Yes, it should work just fine. The only reason Snow Leopard needs the DVD is because the Recovery is not built-in. Lion through El Capitan has the Recovery built-in, and it will reinstall OS X using whatever current version you are on. If not, you might need to download the firmware to use the Internet Recovery version, but this installs whatever was originally on the computer, so you'd have to update your OS again from the Mac App Store.
My hard drive crashed on my Imac took it to computer repair they installed new hard drive, tried to recover data but could not, when we presented the imac to the apple store they told me i would have to buy back my old hd from them um hello no way, so thats why we went to another place that works on macs, so apple said i had lion on the mac, i couldnt remeber but now i remember i had leopard, the computer place installed lion, well now I cannot get any of my programs installed from the dics i have, like my photo software, etc, any cd i put in stays in for a minute then pops back out
I got screwed over when I clicked on Reinstall OS X. Oh the joy of reading Service currently not available when it tries to download Mavericks online and all the while having only windows computer working.
If you have a Windows keyboard, to use "Command R," you should try using Windows R. If that doesn't work, try using just Alt (which is Option on Macs) to access your Recovery HD. Boot up that drive and you should see the Mac OS X Utilities screen.
Hi! Whenever I turn on my iMac, it would load up to the apple logo and shut down after a few seconds. This happened ever time i tried to turn it back on again. I had a bit of hope but nothing ever changed so I decided to erase my disk and was immediately promoted me to restart my computer. When I did, it brought me a a symbol of a folder with a question mark which flashed forever. I held the power button to turn it off and hit it to turn it on again while pressing command and R keys at the same time, it brings me a sign of a spinning globe that loads forever. When I restart it and immediately insert its installation DVD while pressing key C, it brings me the apple logo and stays like that for ages. This is freaking me out. I have read and tried so may solutions online but nothing has changed. Please help me with another way.
replaced the crashed HD in my MacBook Pro with a Seagate 1 TB. Now I need to format the new HD. Do I need a utility disk? I never created one on this Macbook Pro can I create a utility disk from a newer iMac?
You can create a bootable USB drive (here are instructions for Yosemite, El Capitan, or older systems) from your iMac, then boot into it on your MacBook Pro using the Option key. Select the disk from the menu, select your language, then choose Disk Utility from the Utility drop-down menu and proceed to reformat it to the right settings. Then you can go back and install the OS.
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