Cannot load recovery mode

[macintooooosh]

Hi, I'm selling my MBP and trying to follow the steps here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT201065 - I'm at the point of rebooting in recovery mode in order to launch disk utility, but when I boot with cmd-R I see a stop sign (circle with bar through it) and then never ending loading.

I can still reboot into regular mode and everything works but just can't get recovery. I tried zapping PRAM already too but no difference. Any ideas as what to do or just another way I can safely remove my files much appreciated. Thanks

Senior noob

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Oh also it's running 10.7.5

 

[DeltaMac]

Sounds like your recovery partition is corrupted.
Boot to internet recovery (Restart with Option-Command-R)
That internet recovery takes somewhat longer, because your MBPro has to connect to Apple's servers. It also means that you need to have an internet connection to do that.
The internet recovery will boot to the same screen that you should be getting from your recovery partition. You can erase your hard drive, then reinstall OS X. Depending on the speed of your network connection, you should be reinstalled in an hour or two.
If you are selling your MBPro, you can quit, then shut down when the new user setup comes up. The new owner then has a freshly installed system to use.

 

[macintooooosh]

Thanks DeltaMac, that worked for me