Help I erased my Startup Disk Please Help!!

[fraserp]

Hello,

I sold my Mac Pro and tried to reset everything. I have accidentally erased my startup disc and it is showing as ‘disk2’ and underneath ‘Mac OS X Base System’

The machine will only allow me to
- restore from a backup (which I don’t have)
- restore from the discs (which I don’t have)
- Go to Disk Utility

Please help, a courier is collecting it tomorrow morning. Is there anything I can do?

Help much appreciated

[brentsg]

I would contact Apple as well as the buyer. Obtain installation disks from Apple and forward to the new owner.

[pprior]

Recovery partition:

http://mac.tutsplus.com/tutorials/se...-to-remove-it/

[monkeybagel]

Originally Posted by fraserp

Hello,

I sold my Mac Pro and tried to reset everything. I have accidentally erased my startup disc and it is showing as ‘disk2’ and underneath ‘Mac OS X Base System’

The machine will only allow me to
- restore from a backup (which I don’t have)
- restore from the discs (which I don’t have)
- Go to Disk Utility

Please help, a courier is collecting it tomorrow morning. Is there anything I can do?

Help much appreciated

It sounds like you are in the recovery partition now. If you are indeed in this partition, it should allow you to (paraphrasing) Install a New Copy of OS X which will fetch the installation files from the Internet.

When you are booted into the Recovery Partition, you will be unable to wipe the entire disk because it is running the recovery software from the disk you are trying to erase. I would recommend securely erasing the "Macintosh HD" partition and not the disk, and do a multi pass erasure on it. When that completes, chose to install the the new copy of OS X and it will fetch 10.7.5 or 10.8.2 from Apple's servers and you will have a new system sans iLife.