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I think I've wiped my OSX HDD... help?

M

MagickJam

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 23, 2011
20
0
Hey guys, today I have done one of the stupidest things in my entire life. I was screwing around with my partitions on my boot-camped windows partition, trying to add more space to it, (I still couldn't figure out how to do this, any tips?) and I appear to have accidentally wiped my ENTIRE Macintosh HD. Don't ask me how I didn't realise what I was doing, though I did think that maybe the process was taking a while... heh... eh. Fortunately, I have made a time capsule backup very recently, and so I can restore from that backup, if only I knew how to reinstall Mac OSX. The issue is that I HAD Lion installed, and I downloaded THAT from the Mac App Store, so no CD... And the funny thing is, that in 'Computer', there are TWO HDD's: BOOTCAMP, AND Macintosh HD - it appears to still be there, but when I hold alt/option when booting, only the Windows partition appears, and in all of the Windows partition editors, what USED to be Macintosh HD just appears as empty space. I have included some screenshots below, to show this. Has anybody got some helpful instructions on recovering and/or reinstalling my OSX partition?

Capture.png

This is what shows up in the partition editor.

Capture2.png

And THIS is what shows up in 'Computer'.
 
Well from what I can tell, there is NO Lion recovery HD, that was my first thought, but alas I may have actually wiped that as well... -_- Haha, yeah, I have a pretty boring life actually... In fact I think I DO have my Snow Leopard disk somewhere. Will I be able to boot from that and then install Lion from the App Store?
 
Get one of those USB install drives? May be a pain to create those in Windows, but worth a try. If you have an Apple Store nearby, I'd call them up, see if they would be willing to install it for you, they should have all the install disks there.
 
Yeah, I suppose the USB things are an option. Sadly my nearest Apple store is an hour and a half's drive or so from where I am, and I can't afford to go that far outta my way... Oh, but I do have brother with Lion installed, could I maybe use his install to reinstall my OSX? Can i burn it onto a disk or something?
 
What model Mac do you have? If it's a recent one, Command-R at boot time will either launch the recovery partition if it's there or take you to internet recovery, that would allow you to download the Lion installer and reinstall from there.

If it's an earlier Mac, you'd have to find another Mac with a DVD-R drive. Download the Lion installer there and pull the ESD.DMG out of the package and burn that (instructions are easy to google) to a DVD.
 
Okay, well I bought it in October 2010, so yeah, you're right, it came out earlier that year. I tried holding option, but the only thing that came up was 'Windows'. I'm going to try COMMAND-R now, see what happens.

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Okay, thanks for that link. I'll install and try it.
 
MagickJam said:
In fact I think I DO have my Snow Leopard disk somewhere. Will I be able to boot from that and then install Lion from the App Store?
Click to expand...

If you have your Snow Leopard disk you can just install it, and then use the App Store to download and install Lion again. It will let you re-download for free using this trick.
 
Alrighty guys, thanks for all the advice! Turns out the CMD-R thing worked, and I was able to reformat the empty space and reinstall Lion, AND the time capsule backup was all intact and such. It's such a relief that none of my data was lost, or anything. Okay, thanks again,

-Magick
 
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