Resolved Having a tough time clean installing OSX

[Member2010]

[solution in post #5!]

I've got an old MacBook laptop that I'm looking to sell and am having trouble clean-installing OSX on it. It had 10.6 running already, and I ran an upgrade installation to get it on 10.7. From here, I tried booting into the Lion recovery wizard and clicking the "reinstall Lion" button, but I keep getting stuck on the "enter a user id and password" screen.

In an effort to bypass this, I was hoping there might be a way to use my Lion DMG image inside of this recovery environment and just clean install it that way. I went into the disk utility and mounted the image successfully, but couldn't open it in the file explorer because you don't get to use that in the recovery environment. I tried opening the installer from the mounted image through the command line, but just got some funky error.

Is there a way to either bypass the "user id and password" or run the lion installer from the mounted DMG image file? I'm just trying to clean install here.

Thanks.

 

[Weaselboy]

You can just DL Lion from the App Store and use that to make a USB installer with a 8GB USB key and this app.

Then option key boot to the installer and erase the disk with Diks Util and reinstall.

 

[Member2010]

storage

You can just DL Lion from the App Store and use that to make a USB installer with a 8GB USB key and this app.

Then option key boot to the installer and erase the disk with Diks Util and reinstall.

Can I download it without a user ID and password? I actually already wiped out the disk except for the recovery mode as well.

 

[Weaselboy]

Can I download it without a user ID and password? I actually already wiped out the disk except for the recovery mode as well.

No, you will need to use your AppleID to DL it. Thing is, you can just enter the AppleID when prompted from recovery and go ahead and install and just give it to the new owner. This will not associate your AppleID with the install. The AppleID just allows the download, it does not link the install to your AppleID. The issue will be the new owner will not be able to reinstall if they ever want to since they do not own Lion attached to their AppleID. The new owner could always buy Lion if they need to reinstall with their own AppleID.

There is a way to capture the DMG here. You could do that and make a USB installer and do a clean install, but it still does not solve the problem for the new owner, plus like I said, you don't really need to do this anyway.

 

[Member2010]

Solution!

Ah ha! I figured it out! Turns out, this particular model is in fact capable of booting from USB and it also turns out that the DMG of the installer is in fact a bootable one. All I had to do fix the problem was to use the disk utility on another computer running OSX (for those of you following along at home with no OSX computer available, a virtual machine will probably do the job just as well) to "restore" that DMG image of Lion to a USB drive and boot the laptop from it. In this case, I held down "alt" while starting the Macbook to call up the boot menu, and while I didn't see the drive on the list at first, unplugging it and plugging it back in seemed to get it to show up and ultimately boot from it.

From here (again, for those of you following along at home), this DMG will boot into a nearly identical recovery environment to the one that Lion installs onto the hard drive, but this one is the real deal - it'll let you "reinstall Lion" without connecting to the internet or inputting a password.