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Today I decided after 6 years to format my MacBook Pro 2009 laptop. Originally I had Snow Leopard on it (I still have an unscratched cd) but in some point back in 2012 a friend installed (using his appledId) the Mountain Lion.

I've been messing around with this the whole day and have tried a bunch of different things and now I think I am in the worst possible situation.

In the beginning I restarted the mac and pressed as described online the cmd+R combination. I formated my disk and then tried to reinstall the osx.

The dialog box was saying Mountain Lion and it was asking for an appleId. Obviously my appledId wouldn't work cause I never purchased it.

Then I thought to use my Snow Leopard cd and boot from there (holding the option key). I tried several times but for some reason the mac dvd player keeps rejecting my cd. This is what I call bad luck.

So after some hours, working on my second laptop I decide to do something crazy. Install Ubuntu through a live usb memory stick. I create one, plug it in the mac and make the whole installation. That was completely stupid of me. I had problems with the graphic card and things were not displayed correctly.

I remove the Ubuntu using gParted and now I am in the point where I start the mac and I get a blinking folder with a questiomark in the middle.

I have no idea what to do. When I click the options button, I get nothing. Not even the harddrive. When I place the cd of SnowLeopard I also get nothing and after a while the cd is rejected.

So what am I supposed to do now? Any help would be mostly appreciated!

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    Optical driver was extremely dusty. I cleaned it by wrapping some thin textile around a creditcard and dropping some lense liquid. A lot of dust inside there. After this the dvd was recognized. I faced one more problem. My harddrive was still not recognizable. After reformating it (Mac Journalled) through disk utillity everything worked fine! At last!
    – user1919
    Commented Aug 18, 2015 at 21:57
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    Sounds good! You should add that comment as your answer.
    – Spotlight
    Commented Aug 18, 2015 at 22:35

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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  1. First things, power on with the space key pressed to eject the CD if needed.
  2. Then power on with command+s held - if there is any OS X volume that's bootable, you can get some basic info
  3. If not, reset the NVRAM - (Command Option P R) and hold until you hear the third boot chime.
  4. After the third chime, hold option only and you should end up at a grey screen.

Take a picture of that and post a follow on question with more details / less broad open-ended. If you want to boot from the CD/DVD and wipe everything, ask that. If you can get to single user mode, then you might be able to patch things together.

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