MacOS – Reinstall Mac OS X Mountain Lion before selling a Mac

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I want to sell my laptop (Macbook Pro late 2011).
I have erased my disk drive but it seems that I cannot reinstall Mac OS without an Apple ID.
At the origin my mac was shipped with Lion, I have upgraded to Mountain Lion and now my recovery partition contain the installer for Mountain Lion. When I try to reinstall Mac, it asks for my apple ID. Since I want to sell it, I don't want to put any of my information in it.
How do you do that?

Best Answer

If you consider that the license for Mountain Lion doesn't look to be transferrable to the new owner (as most are probably not clear legally to transfer/sell/give away an App Store license for Mountain Lion) then other options might make more sense than just installing Mountain Lion.

Why not reinstall Lion which is tied directly to the hardware. You need no Apple ID to use Internet Recovery or the Lion recovery disk assistant. You could optionally offer to assist the buyer in upgrading to Mountain Lion and also ensure they understand iLife might not be included with this sale.

You could gift some or all of the apps to their Apple ID, give a physical gift card to cover the expected cost of the software or renegotiate the sale price of the Mac.

We have a discussion of more options on this thread:

Where can I get a copy of Mountain Lion that I can resell with my Apple hardware?

Apple documents the reinstall and erase options at:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204904

Related Solutions

MacOS – Why is the Mountain Lion Installer unable to complete due to recovery partition problems

From what I've been able to gather, this issue occurred because of the existence of partition 4. A default install of OS X, as of Lion, involves three partitions: EFI, your OS X boot volume, and the recover partition.

Features such as Recovery Mode and FileVault require original partitioning schemes in many cases - especially when FileVault is already in use on a partition, as it the partition scheme has been converted to a CoreStorage group. This makes things much messier to try installing without an original layout.

This seems to be the most likely cause of your error. Since I have no logs, dumps, or other material to go by, I can only speculate and apply my knowledge and experience to the matter. However, seeing as OS X installed just fine to the 4th partition, which was blank, it seems to me that the partition scheme itself was to blame, as I stated above. Sorry about the inconvenience.

Good luck and happy upgrading!

MacOS – How to install Mountain Lion on a disk that cannot be formatted in recovery mode

You should be able to use dd to destroy the partition's header. You can then format (erase) it and run the install.

From the installer run Terminal and type the following:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk0s2 bs=1024 count=1024

Do be warned, this will irrecoverably destroy all data on that partition. But it looks like that's what you're expecting. Make sure you don't accidentally target the wrong thing.

Also note that I haven't done this, exactly. I've used this technique to destroy the entire partition table, not just a single partition. But I think it should work.

When you're done quit Terminal and run Disk Utility. You won't get any complaints about Core Storage.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MacOS – Why is the Mountain Lion Installer unable to complete due to recovery partition problems

MacOS – How to install Mountain Lion on a disk that cannot be formatted in recovery mode

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