Will I lose lion ?

[heslopch]

Have a 2nd hand air 2011 and the user before didn't do a full wipe just deleted his stuff off .he also bought lion .question is if I wipe the mac will I loose lion and will I have to pay for it or will it still be on there??

 

[ugahairydawgs]

There is a recovery partition on the HDD. If you boot from that you should be able to erase the boot drive and re-load lion.

If you want to be extra careful you should be able to go into the MAS and download a copy of Lion and create your own recovery disc on an external drive.

Instructions for that: http://www.macworld.com/article/1161069/make_a_bootable_lion_installer.html

 

[bogatyr]

If the Air is a 2011 model, it supports internet recovery. You can wipe the drive and it will download a copy from Apple and reinstall. Hold Control-R during boot up, use the disk tool to erase the drive, then run the recovery tool.

However, when you say he bought Lion, that makes me wonder if it is really a 2011 model. All the 2011 models came with Lion - as far as I know.

 

[heslopch]

Where will it tell me which model And if its been installed or not.The keypad lights up so thought only 2011 .

 

[heslopch]

Ya in overview has i5 MacBook air 4, 1

 

[ATC]

FWIW, I recently had to do a reinstall of Lion using the Recovery HD partition and what it does is ask for your Apple ID log-in credentials and verifies it just before it re-downloads Lion, so you'll have to have had purchased it using your Apple ID prior to going ahead with a reload. At least that's been my experience when I did this last week.

 

[bogatyr]

FWIW, I recently had to do a reinstall of Lion using the Recovery HD partition and what it does is ask for your Apple ID log-in credentials and verifies it just before it re-downloads Lion, so you'll have to have had purchased it using your Apple ID prior to going ahead with a reload. At least that's been my experience when I did this last week.

What model Air? I believe that is required on ones who had SL but not Lion from the factory. My Lion laptops have not required an iTunes account to restore.

 

[ET iPhone Home]

Exactly, as stated above, you will need the apple i.d. and password to redownload OSX from the app store.

 

[ATC]

What model Air? I believe that is required on ones who had SL but not Lion from the factory. My Lion laptops have not required an iTunes account to restore.

You might be correct; the machine came preinstalled with 10.6 but I purchased Lion from the MAS and had removed SL entirely and replaced it with 10.7.

 

[bogatyr]

Exactly, as stated above, you will need the apple i.d. and password to redownload OSX from the app store.

The ones I've had with Lion from the factory contacted Apple for the reinstall and sent the system info (presumably the serial number) and then installed. No Apple ID required.

 

[Medic278]

You are going to have to make a recovery drive as others have said there are many ways to do this. My preference is using a USB flash drive with at least 4GB of free space.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/recovery/

The USB option is down at the bottom of the page, its pretty straight forward and doesn't require any real skill to do.