Can't reinstall Mountain Lion

[Jopeth]

My friends Macbook Air died today from the start up disk being too full. I talked to an apple engineer in a shop and he said you can download OS X Mountain Lion being 4.4Gb, put it on a usb set up to reinstall. I downloaded mountain lion on my app store on my macbook pro. My friend carried on and erased the memory and had the USB plugged in. On the installation page you click continue to install. It then comes up to what drive you want it to install to and the USB stick is the only one that comes up.

Anyone know where the inbuilt harddrive is and how to fix this issue?

Any suggestions will be great.

 

[bbfc]

My friends Macbook Air died today from the start up disk being too full. I talked to an apple engineer in a shop and he said you can download OS X Mountain Lion being 4.4Gb, put it on a usb set up to reinstall. I downloaded mountain lion on my app store on my macbook pro. My friend carried on and erased the memory and had the USB plugged in. On the installation page you click continue to install. It then comes up to what drive you want it to install to and the USB stick is the only one that comes up.

Anyone know where the inbuilt harddrive is and how to fix this issue?

Any suggestions will be great.

Did he use disk utility from within the bootable drive to format the hard drive etc?

 

[Jopeth]

Yes, but my friend believes that he erased the whole hard drive instead of the parition?

When I try starting it up now a folder shows up but flashes and has a question mark inside of it. I believe it does that when it cannot detect the hard drive.

 

[bbfc]

Yes, but my friend believes that he erased the whole hard drive instead of the parition?

When I try starting it up now a folder shows up but flashes and has a question mark inside of it. I believe it does that when it cannot detect the hard drive.

If you plug the USB in and boot from that, run disk utility and format the drive. Then it should detect it and allow you to install to it.

Some additional info… http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1440?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

 

[steel98]

Well, why you have to buy OS X for repair you MacBook? But why...

What if I try to reinstall OS X from Internet, there are one of the option in Boot Manager...?

 

[Weaselboy]

Anyone know where the inbuilt harddrive is and how to fix this issue?

Any suggestions will be great.

If you are booting from a USB key and the installer cannot even see the drive, that points to a dead drive.

 

[bbfc]

Well, why you have to buy OS X for repair you MacBook? But why...

What if I try to reinstall OS X from Internet, there are one of the option in Boot Manager...?

You should have a recovery partition that was created when you installed OS X or came with your mac. Restart your mac an hold down CMD-R to boot into recovery mode.

If you bought OS X from the MAS you can redownload and create a bootable drive.

 

[Jopeth]

If you are booting from a USB key and the installer cannot even see the drive, that points to a dead drive.

You were correct. Took it into an apple engineer and had to replace the hard drive. Luckily it was just covered under warranty!

Thanks for your help!

 

[Weaselboy]

You were correct. Took it into an apple engineer and had to replace the hard drive. Luckily it was just covered under warranty!

Thanks for your help!

You are quite welcome. Glad you got it fixed up.