I am trying to reformat my MBP 13" late 2012 as I've sold it on eBay. I have KnowHow support from PC World and they're absolutely useless and just the most arrogant people I've ever spoke to in my entire life. Anyway enough about that…
I was told to press CMD + R to start the recovery process on reboot, it comes straight up with internet recovery where it downloads and after that is complete it just comes up with a No Entry symbol for about 5 minutes then restarts and just asks me to login. I've rebooted and held down alt (option or whatever it's called) and I can see the recovery partition and when I select it, it will not load and asks if I want to restart. I've downloaded OS X Recovery Disk Assistant v1.0 to a portable hard drive and it does the exact same thing, it will not load the recovery assistant.
Does anyone have any ideas? Pretty much needed to get this shipped off today.
Best Answer
The fastest method around a sticky recovery partition is to just boot your Mac in target disk mode and connect it to another Mac and have that OS run Disk Utility to erase / zero the drive.
At that point, you should have far less issues reinstalling the OS in recovery mode. Depending on the agreement you had with the buyer, you could just send the Mac to them with a wiped drive and let them sort out the reinstall since then their Apple ID will be associated with the upgrade / app store instead of yours.
To diagnose why your Mac isn't starting will likely require access to the install logs and/or system logs.