OS Trouble

[ImAvalon]

Hey everyone, long time reader, first time poster! well I had received developer preveiw 3 for OS Lion (macbook Pro early 2011). and I wasn't able to upgrade to the final easily. well, I'm semi new to mac. I had no idea what I was doing, and I went to the utility and deleted everything from my mac. I can't do anything....at all. I tried re-installing preview 3 and it says the version I have is damaged. and that's pretty much the only menu I can get to (disk utility). How can I fix this? preferably getting back to snow leopard and just skip to the final release of lion. please help me! I can supply screen shots as well if needed.

 

[r0k]

Hey everyone, long time reader, first time poster! well I had received developer preveiw 3 for OS Lion (macbook Pro early 2011). and I wasn't able to upgrade to the final easily. well, I'm semi new to mac. I had no idea what I was doing, and I went to the utility and deleted everything from my mac. I can't do anything....at all. I tried re-installing preview 3 and it says the version I have is damaged. and that's pretty much the only menu I can get to (disk utility). How can I fix this? preferably getting back to snow leopard and just skip to the final release of lion. please help me! I can supply screen shots as well if needed.

What does disk utility say about your HDD? Do you have a recovery partition or was that not included in the developer previews?

Based on my incomplete understanding of your situation, I suggest you could boot from the Snow Leopard DVD, run disk utility from the file menu on the Snow Leopard DVD and wipe your hdd and reinstall Snow Leopard. You do have all your stuff backed up don't you? Assuming you do, in disk utility, select partition scheme 1 partition and name it macintosh hd making sure the options are set to guid and the type is hfs+ journaled. Then you can quit disk utility and simply continue the Snow Leopard installation.

Now let's assume for a minute you DON'T have anything backed up. You can boot from the Snow Leopard DVD and you might be able to pick archive and install to get back to Snow Leopard. This depends on whether the Lion recovery partition is sitting there to get in your way.

 

[ImAvalon]

I actually don't have anything backed up, there was nothing I really had on this computer. hardly used it. And I do have all the disks,but I will def try this and give a reply within a couple of minutes thanks for the help.

 

[ImAvalon]

So I looked through everything, I'm not able to boot up from the snow leopard disk. Not gonna lie I'm new to mac and I was barely even able to understand windows, I'm better with online stuff then I am on a computer (if that makes any sense) but I took some pictures of the only screens I'm able to access. by holding alt on startup i'm able to access two different drives 'recover hd" and the other is "base system" these options are located in both systems

sorry if i'm difficult, I'm trying really hard to understand all this..

 

[ImAvalon]

so I tried partition, sorry took me a while to start understanding. and it comes up ass

Partition failed with the error
couldn't unmount disk

 

[Quad5Ny]

This; http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3910 or bring your MacBook into a Apple store. I'm sure a genius will be happy to reinstall for you, it only takes 20 min.

And FYI in that picture it looks like you have the Applications DVD in the drive. Your need to find the System DVD and put that in (Applications DVD only includes the iLife suite).

 

[ImAvalon]

lol I feel like a loser for not seeing something so lame. well I got it working, after this I will re install the final version of lion. I REALLY appreciate your guys help.