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Second hand Macbook aluminum ML problem

L

LimeLizard

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 27, 2013
3
0
A few days ago i bought a Macbook aluminum that was advertised as including Mountain Lion and Office 2011. This is my first Mac and i have found that Mountain Lion seems to be bound to one of the previous owners accounts.
Now the Macbook came with no discs of documentation of any kind, so is there a way to deal with this that does not involve reinstalling anything and losing Office which i paid an extra €150 for. Will Mountain Lion deactivate or auto log out the account, if not is there a way for me to buy a new copy of ML without reinstalling and losing Office, also is Office also bound to this account. Can Apple help at all here?
 
LimeLizard said:
A few days ago i bought a Macbook aluminum that was advertised as including Mountain Lion and Office 2011. This is my first Mac and i have found that Mountain Lion seems to be bound to one of the previous owners accounts.
Now the Macbook came with no discs of documentation of any kind, so is there a way to deal with this that does not involve reinstalling anything and losing Office which i paid an extra €150 for. Will Mountain Lion deactivate or auto log out the account, if not is there a way for me to buy a new copy of ML without reinstalling and losing Office, also is Office also bound to this account. Can Apple help at all here?
Click to expand...

If the mac came originally with ML you don't need to purchase it, you could use the Recovery HD to reinstall if needed, just for your information, hold Command and R keys at startup to get into Recovery HD.

Edit: if it is the aluminium Macbook it came with 10.5.5 so you have to repurchase ML and SL
 
Macbook Model

It is a late 2008 Macbook aluminum. I think this originally had Leopard. The seller told me he installed a new hard drive though so maybe there is a different recovery partition. Will the app store react adversely if I sign in with a different ID? If I have a recovery partition for ML what will happen to the account association when i reinstall?
 
Last edited:
LimeLizard said:
It is a late 2008 Macbook aluminum. I think this originally had Leopard. The seller told me he installed a new hard drive though so maybe there is a different recovery partition. Will the app store react adversely if I sign in with a different ID? If I have a recovery partition for ML what will happen to the account association when i reinstall?
Click to expand...

Couple things going on here.

If the previous owner installed ML, that would have created a ML recovery partition. You can test it out by doing a command-r boot and it will come up.

The problem is if you erase the drive and go to reinstall ML, you will be asked for the AppleID that was used to purchase/install Mountain Lion from the app. store. You won't have that of course since it was the previous owners ID, and you will be sunk. The best thing for you to do at this point to make sure you can recover if you ever need to it open the App Store app and buy ML under your AppleID. You don't need to reinstall ML now if you don't want to, but this way if you ever do need to reinstall your AppleID can be sued to do that.

The AppleID used to install ML has nothing to do with whatever AppleID is used to purchase apps from the App Store. If you use your ID to buy some apps they will work fine on your machine as is. If there are Apple App Store apps on there now the previous owner installed under his ID, nothing will happen to them if you login under your ID. However, without his AppleID, none of those apps will ever get updated from the app store if updates are issued.

MS Office is a different issue. If it is running now, it is running under serial number entered/purchased by the previous owner. If you do not delete or erase anything it will continue to work. But if you erase the drive you will have no way to get Office back without buying it.
 
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