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skeen

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 12, 2007
264
0
London, England
Hi all,

Done quite a bit of searching on this already, and have not been able to turn up anything that would resolve this issue.

The short of it is that I am giving away my late 2010 Macbook Air 11". When I do a restore, and select to reinstall Lion (as I'd like it to just have a clean slate), I get the error "This Apple ID has not purchased Lion".

Odd...Lion came preinstalled. Subsequently, I used the Disk Utility to erase the drive, as I thought that might somehow help...but that was a mistake because now I have to use internet recovery to get to this part of the process.

So I really don't know what to do by this point. The only way I'm going to get the Macbook to working order is to reinstall Lion...but it won't let me. I also tried to use restore to restore a Time Machine backup, but that tells me there isn't enough space to load it.

Any ideas?
 

krravi

macrumors 65816
Nov 30, 2010
1,173
0
Hi all,

Done quite a bit of searching on this already, and have not been able to turn up anything that would resolve this issue.

The short of it is that I am giving away my late 2010 Macbook Air 11". When I do a restore, and select to reinstall Lion (as I'd like it to just have a clean slate), I get the error "This Apple ID has not purchased Lion".

Odd...Lion came preinstalled. Subsequently, I used the Disk Utility to erase the drive, as I thought that might somehow help...but that was a mistake because now I have to use internet recovery to get to this part of the process.

So I really don't know what to do by this point. The only way I'm going to get the Macbook to working order is to reinstall Lion...but it won't let me. I also tried to use restore to restore a Time Machine backup, but that tells me there isn't enough space to load it.

Any ideas?

Thats why we need good old CD's for this kind of things.

I don't know what is going on with the "Not purchased" message. But I am curious about the Time Machine restore issue.

Boot into recovery and wipe the hard disk again before doing a time machine restore. Instead of doing an erase, delete the partition and create a new one and then try the restore.
 

skeen

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 12, 2007
264
0
London, England
Boot into recovery and wipe the hard disk again before doing a time machine restore. Instead of doing an erase, delete the partition and create a new one and then try the restore.

Tried that already...but it seems that some space in the disk is still being taken up by OS X stuff, and that part I cannot get rid of (no option to). At the time of backing up via Time Machine, the harddrive was almost full.

It seems the only way to really get this working again is to resolve this Apple ID thingie, to reinstall.
 

krravi

macrumors 65816
Nov 30, 2010
1,173
0
Tried that already...but it seems that some space in the disk is still being taken up by OS X stuff, and that part I cannot get rid of (no option to). At the time of backing up via Time Machine, the harddrive was almost full.

It seems the only way to really get this working again is to resolve this Apple ID thingie, to reinstall.

Are you talking about the recovery partition? Yes thats hidden but you can make it visible and then erase it.. But you have to make a copy of the hidden partition to a USB Flash drive etc...

So when you made the time machine backup and your hard disk was full I am assuming that the time machine has a not so complete copy of your hard disk for that given time.

Now what happens if you choose an earlier date in Time Machine? Probably the earliest date of your backup where you have not filled it up with files.
 

skeen

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 12, 2007
264
0
London, England
I only have 1 Time Machine backup. Regardless, I ultimately want to reinstall Lion...and it just plain seems that I don't have the option to do that.
 

krravi

macrumors 65816
Nov 30, 2010
1,173
0
I only have 1 Time Machine backup. Regardless, I ultimately want to reinstall Lion...and it just plain seems that I don't have the option to do that.

Did you register your computer with Apple when you bought it? If not try registering. And they try the reinstall.

Looks like your serial number is not in their database for them to verify the Lion upgrade.
 

thejadedmonkey

macrumors G3
May 28, 2005
9,156
3,265
Pennsylvania
Did you register your computer with Apple when you bought it? If not try registering. And they try the reinstall.

Looks like your serial number is not in their database for them to verify the Lion upgrade.

Lion was a download only OS I believe, so shouldn't it be in the system regardless?
 

skeen

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 12, 2007
264
0
London, England
The Macbook is in my support profile, so it's been registered. I'm in a total bind right now. There is no way I can reinstall Lion.
 

2298754

Cancelled
Jun 21, 2010
4,890
941
Worst case scenario, you can just torrent Lion off the internet. You should be ok because you already technically own it.
 
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