Can't Format HDD

[Chazz08]

A friend of mine accidentally formatted a boot CD to his HDD. Now, when he enters recovery mode, he can't reformat the hard drive to fix it. He said he did get rid of the DVD stuff on it and renamed it Macintosh HD, but when he tries to reinstall the OS it says there isn't a source to install the OS onto.


Any ideas on how to fix this? Thanks!

[EDIT] I found this and he is trying it now. I'll report back. It didn't have anything to do with Windows XP, but if this let's him reformat, it might work.


http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2176?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

 

[Chazz08]

Nope. Didn't work. Any ideas? It actually said that it couldn't find "disk0" or "disk0s2", which is the one that he said was the Mac HD one.

 

[Weaselboy]

Nope. Didn't work. Any ideas? It actually said that it couldn't find "disk0" or "disk0s2", which is the one that he said was the Mac HD one.

Is it a newer (2011+) iMac? If it is, have him try holding command-option-r at boot to get to Internet recovery. Once that loads start Disk Utility and select the drive brand name at the top (like Seagate 500GB or whatever), then erase the while drive to Mac OS Extended format. Then quit Disk Utility and click reinstall OS.