Deleted my mac os x lion hard drive

[BoxedUser]

Mid 2011 Imac (Lion preinstalled)

Formatted the hard drive to ntfs, now im in a bit of a pickle.'
Do i need to get snow leopard disk & install it then buy another copy of lion from mac app store, heard snow leopard is not bookable so do i need to buy another mac($$$) and use target disk mode and install snow leopard and continue from there?

 

[Intell]

Have you tried using Lion's Internet Recovery mode?

 

[Texran]

If you happen to encounter a situation in which you cannot start from the Recovery HD, such as your hard drive stopped responding or you installed a new hard drive without Mac OS X installed,*new Mac models introduced after public availability of OS X Lion automatically use the Lion Internet Recovery feature if the Recovery HD*(Command-R method above) doesn't work. Lion Internet Recovery lets you start your Mac directly from Apple's Servers. The system runs a quick test of your memory and hard drive to ensure there are no hardware issues.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718

 

[BoxedUser]

tried running internet recovery i get a error quarter way to full in the progress bar also recovery partition was inside the hard drive which i unintentionally formatted.

 

[Intell]

If you can't get Recovery Mode to work right, you'll have to find some way of making a Lion USB recovery drive with Apple's utility.

 

[LeandrodaFL]

You may have to reformat HFS+

 

[Fishrrman]

"You may have to reformat HFS+"

Agreed on this point.

I don't think Lion can be installed on a drive that is initialized to ntfs. Why would you do this in the first place?

I believe that in order to install Lion -- and to even persuade the Lion installer app to "see" the target drive -- it MUST be initialized to HFS+, with journaling ENabled, and GUID partition map.

If you have a completely hosed Mac, in ntfs, with no OS DVD (or other source) from which to install, your best bet is to "start over from scratch" with _some kind_ of BOOTABLE media.

Perhaps the easiest way is to buy the Lion USB flash-drive package. More expensive but it _should_ boot the Mac, and give you the opportunity to do a clean install.

And, next time, use either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper to create a fully-bootable cloned backup of your OS on a separate external drive (or, better yet, get a USB/SATA dock and a bare drive combo). If you had had this in the first place, re-installation would have taken no longer than the time it would have taken to "copy over" from the backup to the internal drive....

 

[BoxedUser]

"You may have to reformat HFS+"

Agreed on this point.

I don't think Lion can be installed on a drive that is initialized to ntfs. Why would you do this in the first place?

I believe that in order to install Lion -- and to even persuade the Lion installer app to "see" the target drive -- it MUST be initialized to HFS+, with journaling ENabled, and GUID partition map.

If you have a completely hosed Mac, in ntfs, with no OS DVD (or other source) from which to install, your best bet is to "start over from scratch" with _some kind_ of BOOTABLE media.

Perhaps the easiest way is to buy the Lion USB flash-drive package. More expensive but it _should_ boot the Mac, and give you the opportunity to do a clean install.

And, next time, use either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper to create a fully-bootable cloned backup of your OS on a separate external drive (or, better yet, get a USB/SATA dock and a bare drive combo). If you had had this in the first place, re-installation would have taken no longer than the time it would have taken to "copy over" from the backup to the internal drive....

Thank you so much, helped a lot thought you need snow leopard