A colleague of mine gave me a MacBook Pro that a friend of her has asked for help with.
The MBP is installed with Lion, 10.7.2, but unfortunately the previous owner, the father in the family, died, so I don't have any of the passwords necessary for his App Store account.
I can run the reinstall program from the recovery partition, but of course this wants to activate with App Store with his account.
They are currently waiting for his email accounts to be opened up, and until that happens, requesting a new password from Apple won't do much good either.
However, the new owner, the son in the house, wants to use his own account. Can I activate Lion against his account instead? Of course he has never had a Mac tied to his account so he has not purchased Lion, yet.
What is the best way to move forward with this?
Basically, I want to reinstall the MBP to Lion factory presets, and tie this to the sons account instead of the dead father.
Or should they just take it to a factory outlet? Unfortunately there aren't any native Apple Stores nearby, but there are some … what's the word, Apple Dealers, a local electronics shop that has a large Apple section. Would they be equipped to do this?
Can this be done? If so, how?
Best Answer
It can only be done if the son's account has purchased a copy of Lion from the Mac App Store. So either wait to get the password for the father's Apple ID or have the son drop $30 and purchase a new copy of Lion.