My friends late 2009 won't boot into recovery

His system shuts off whenever we try to boot into recovery. It's running Lion and when we try to do CMD + R, it will show the spinning gear, and then shut down.

The system boots normally, but it's used and he wants to wipe and have a clean install

ideas?

session101 said:

have your recovery CD/flash disk and boot computer holding down the option key, then select to boot from CD/Device and start your installation

before you install you can use disk utility to format the HD and start over Clean

Click to expand...

Yeah, that's the problem...He doesn't have the disk...Can we make one in OSX?