Lion restore w/out recovery partition or discs

[Pa Shizzle]

I just purchased my first Macbook. A used mid 2009 15". I am new to Mac computers. It did not come with any discs and there is no recovery partition either.

I am wanting to restore the whole system due to the previous users leftover stuff still there. I do not care about saving any information that is currently on the computer.

I have tried the Recovery Disk Assistant on a thumb drive and have attempted the Internet Recovery however from what I understand, without the recovery partition, both of these options will not work and neither one has worked.

What is the best way to go about restoring? Will upgrading to Mountain Lion via the App Store give me the option to, or automatically create, the recovery partition? (then I can do a restore from one of the previously mentioned ways) Or do I find a friend who has some discs laying around that I can use?

Thanks for the help!

 

[JediMeister]

That computer shipped with either 10.5 or 10.6, so it would not have a recovery partition, which was introduced on computers starting with 10.7. That system also does not support Internet recovery.

What version of the OS is currently installed, and do you have administrator access? If you have 10.6.8 and admin access, buy 10.8 from the Mac App Store and install. This will give you a recovery partition where you can then do a clean install, also known as an Erase and Install, and start from scratch. Note that this will leave you without the iLife applications like iPhoto, GarageBand, and iMovie, and will get rid of iWeb and iDVD, if they are currently installed, because they are not available on the Mac App Store like the other 3 applications mentioned. If you don't have admin access, you can pay Apple for replacement copies of the original install media, which they should still have available, or look for a means to reset the password through single-user mode on the Internet and then upgrade to 10.8 and follow through with the Erase and Install.

The gray restore discs will only work with particular hardware are not compatible with all makes and models universally. Retail discs will only work on computers that shipped with an earlier version of the OS, ex, a 10.6 retail copy will boot a computer that shipped with 10.5 but not one that came with 10.6.5.

 

[Pa Shizzle]

I am running 10.7.5 with admin rights. Thankfully no iLife apps are installed. I will try the purchase of 10.8.

 

[Pa Shizzle]

Thank you JediMeister! I'm up and running!