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Resolved Re-instaling OSX Licence

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maticb

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 7, 2012
19
0
Hi,
My friend recently bought used Macbook Air. He formated the system partition and now he can only boot into Lion Recovery partition.
Now he wanted to install Mavericks but when I gave him the usb key it wouldt work on his mac, as I mentioned in other thread here.
So now the only option is to reinstall Lion from recovery disk and than upgrade to Mavericks. But as he bought the mac used he doesn't have a licence for Lion and upon installation when he signs in mac app store it gives him an error that he cannot install lion because he hasn't purchased it. Now since Mavericks is free he is of-course not going to buy Lion, the question is: can I enter my account in there (I bought Lion when it came out) and install it like that, than upgrade and sign out and sign him in?
Will that in any way effect my account on the app store?
 
Last edited:
M

Manic Harmonic

macrumors 6502
Dec 4, 2011
299
1
I'm a little confused about the issue, your friend doesn't need to have purchased lion from the app store to use it. The only thing you need the lion license for is to download it from the app store, so as long as you can do a fresh install from the recovery partition, you shouldn't need to worry about any of that. Am I understanding correctly?
 
M

maticb

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 7, 2012
19
0
No, actually, when i boot to recovery I have few possibilities: Restore from Time Machine, Reinstall Mac OSx, Get Help & Disk Utility.
When I select reinstall mac osx it gives me prompt that it can not continue if I don't connect to wifi, and than when I do I need to sign in to App Store, and when I do that it says It cant reinstall. "You must sign in with Apple ID that was used to purchase Lion".
 
Weaselboy

Weaselboy

Moderator
Staff member
Jan 23, 2005
34,136
15,598
California
maticb said:
...the question is: can I enter my account in there (I bought Lion when it came out) and install it like that, than upgrade and sign out and sign him in?

Will that in any way effect my account on the app store?
Click to expand...

That will work fine and get Lion installed and won't do anything to your account. As far as Apple knows this would be a second machine you own and is allowed.

I'm just not sure if Lion updates will apply if you logout of the App Store then he logs in after the install. If you plan to update to Mavericks afterward under his AppleID, this will not be an issue anyway.
 
M

maticb

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 7, 2012
19
0
Weaselboy said:
That will work fine and get Lion installed and won't do anything to your account. As far as Apple knows this would be a second machine you own and is allowed.

I'm just not sure if Lion updates will apply if you logout of the App Store then he logs in after the install. If you plan to update to Mavericks afterward under his AppleID, this will not be an issue anyway.
Click to expand...

Thank you.

At the end I did just that. Installed under my account but then when it installed it asked a couple of settings and for the app store I entered his account.
There was no problem updating the lion (itunes, safari, etc) to the latest version under his account in system update.

Also found out why I couldn't install mavericks: Macbook is to old and not supported :/

Tnx again for all the help!
 
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