I have received an old MacBook from my Dad and he had wiped it clean, but I don't think he's done it correctly.
I am having issues with unmounting and re-installing Lion OS X back on, which it came with.
Can anyone help me please?
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How did you boot the MacBook? – klanomath Feb 05 '16 at 22:35
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when I press the power button, it goes through the loading screen then brings up the disk utilities – andybatch Feb 05 '16 at 22:39
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Specifically, what model Mac is it? – user3439894 Feb 05 '16 at 23:09
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I have removed the battery and the code in there is white/2.1/2x1g/120/combo/ap hope that helps – andybatch Feb 06 '16 at 00:15
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it won't let me change the size of the partition either – andybatch Feb 06 '16 at 00:16
2 Answers
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Probably something went wrong wiping the disk. You can't properly erase/repartition a disk the OS X booted from. Additionally it seems that you don't have a proper Recovery HD.
I recommend either to create a bootable installer thumb drive with the Lion installer or booting to Internet Recovery Mode by pressing altcmdR while booting, formatting the internal disk and restoring OS X. Not all Macs boot to IRM though.
To create a bootable thumb drive you need the Lion installer app, a second Mac and a USB thumb drive (8 GB or more)
klanomath
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He seems to already have a copy of Lion downloaded. Also, he's clearly booting into something, and therefore can probably access a copy of the installer on his current machine. My guess is that he doesn't need a second mac. – JMY1000 Feb 05 '16 at 23:02
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@JMY1000 Yes, he is booting to the volume Recovery Disk Assistant on his main disk, which seems to be useless. – klanomath Feb 05 '16 at 23:07
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He could download and install the installer onto another disk then use the tools on that disk to fix his main disk. – JMY1000 Feb 06 '16 at 00:00
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You can't unmount the disk because you're booting from it. You'll need to boot from an external volume or the internet: I would recommend the latter since it's probably the fastest and most hassle free for trying to reinstall whatever it came with. However, not all Macs support this (yours probably does), so check and see if it's compatible. If not, install OS X on an external volume and boot from it.
