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Passing on a MacBook

A

andyd409

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 23, 2010
59
1
I have a friend who recently went through a double lung transplant. He is now in intensive care for a week or so. But soon he will get out of intensive care and into a regular hospital room and then on to a place close to the hospital for about 4 months as he needs to check-in every other day so that his progress can be closely monitored. He will not be able to go anywhere except the hospital and he will need something to do.

I would like to just buy him a new laptop, but he would not accept it, but I do have a MacBook (early 2009) that is still in very good condition but I no longer use because I have a MacBook Air.

What I would like to do is to wipe it, and pre-configure it with 10.7.2 and iLife and iWork. But I want to make it so that when he first turns it on he gets the “new Mac” experience of seeing the welcome screen and then registering the computer and such.

How do I do this?

Can I do this, or do I need to get help from Apple? (like going to an Apple store and getting a “Genius” to help)

Thanks,

Andy D
 
Last edited:
A

andyd409

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 23, 2010
59
1
DemonicZeus said:
I am not so sure that early 2003 mac could run lion... Is it the macbook air or what???

You can just do it by your self
Click to expand...

Thanks. but...

I made a mistake, it is not 2003, it is an early 2009 and I currently have 10.7 running on it, but I want to wipe it and make it start up like a new Mac.

Thanks,

Andy
 
B

broad

macrumors member
Sep 29, 2009
46
0
https://discussions.apple.com/message/15701551#15701551

I have been able to accomplish this via the following method. I may not be the best idea given it deletes the account while logged in, but worked for me.

1) Do all of the necessary installations, etc. just as under Snow Leopard, using your setupacctname account.

2) Once that is done, BEFORE restarting in single user mode:

sudo su
dscl . -delete /Groups/admin GroupMembership setupacctname
dscl . -delete /Users/setupacctname

3) Reboot into single user mode (Hold Command-s at startup)

4) Check the filesystem: /sbin/fsck -fy

5) Mount the filesystem: /sbin/mount -uw /

6) Remove the setupacctname directory: rm -R /Users/setupacctname

7) Remove or rename .AppleSetupDone so you get the language choice

cd /var/db/
mv .AppleSetupDone .RunLanguageChooserToo

or

rm .AppleSetupDone

8) Delete miscellaneous files (unnecessary, but useful if you're imaging the drive):

rm -R /Library/Caches/*
rm -R /System/Library/Caches/*
rm -R /var/vm/swapfile*

9) Shutdown or restart
Click to expand...
 
Wicked1

Wicked1

macrumors 68040
Apr 13, 2009
3,283
14
New Jersey
+1 to the OP, doing his friend the right way, nice to know there are still cool folks out there, so let him have his story, people helped so need to all stop with the negative remarks.
 
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