Ok, I never used a mac before and I was trying to partition the hard drive. It is fairly new, so there wasn't much data to save. I cleared out the hard drive manually in the Disk utilities and rebooted the laptop. Now I'm getting a grey screen with a question mark. I looked around and I know I have to re-install the software, but I tried everything (Cmnd +R, p+q, holding option takes me to a grey lockscreen) but can't get to the disk utility page again. How do I reinstall the software with no cd drive and my only other desktop is a pc?
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Need help with reinstall
- Thread starter DJ40
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Okay, first question: which OS (Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion) do you have? Did you get any Setup DVD's with the computer?
Assuming a MBA (since that's the forum you're in) and Lion or Mountain Lion (since you say it's "recent")...
Here is the article on using Internet Recovery. It can take a couple tries to get it to come up. You won't see Disk Utility, you'll get a "Mac OS X Utilities" screen. From there you can connect to a Wifi network, and then your Mac will download the OS installer.
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4718
Since you apparently deleted the boot partition from the drive, you deleted the entire operating system - this should get it running again.
Here is the article on using Internet Recovery. It can take a couple tries to get it to come up. You won't see Disk Utility, you'll get a "Mac OS X Utilities" screen. From there you can connect to a Wifi network, and then your Mac will download the OS installer.
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4718
Since you apparently deleted the boot partition from the drive, you deleted the entire operating system - this should get it running again.
Yes, it's a MBA and Mountain Lion. Is there a required download to a USB in order to get to the OSX internet recovery screen? I'm asking because I have rebooted the system many times and never came across a screen different than the grey question mark file. Thanks
Hold down the option key during boot. There will be a recovery option available. When you select the recovery option, it will download Mountain Lion and install it on your system assuming that the OP had ML installed. You will need to connect to your wireless router for all this to happen.