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wiped mac mini clean but forgot to reinstall os

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rocketman5803

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 7, 2014
3
0
Hey folks,

I made a stupid mistake, I shut down the mac mini before reinstalled os online in the recovery mode. Now I boot it up and hold down option key or whatever, it keeps flashing a folder with question mark. I know it indicates it can't find a bootable. Is there anyway that I can get into recovery mode again without having to use an external bootable?

Many thanks!!
 
If you have a fairly modern OS like Mountain Lion or Mavericks you can get into recover mode and do an internet recovery by holding the cmd-r key while booting up and then selecting internet recovery.
 
rocketman5803 said:
Hey folks,

I made a stupid mistake, I shut down the mac mini before reinstalled os online in the recovery mode. Now I boot it up and hold down option key or whatever, it keeps flashing a folder with question mark. I know it indicates it can't find a bootable. Is there anyway that I can get into recovery mode again without having to use an external bootable?

Many thanks!!
Click to expand...

What year is your Mini? If it is 2010+ and you have applied all firmware updates, you can command-option-r boot to Internet recovery and DL the OS even without a recovery partition or OS on the internal drive.

Do you happen to have a current Time Machine backup? If so, you can option key boot to that and restore also.
 
maflynn said:
If you have a fairly modern OS like Mountain Lion or Mavericks you can get into recover mode and do an internet recovery by holding the cmd-r key while booting up and then selecting internet recovery.
Click to expand...

As I said in the title, I erased the hard drive, I was supposed to reinstall OS via Internet right after that, but I shut it down. It's probably because I wiped the bootable partition as well?

----------
Weaselboy said:
What year is your Mini? If it is 2010+ and you have applied all firmware updates, you can command-option-r boot to Internet recovery and DL the OS even without a recovery partition or OS on the internal drive.

Do you happen to have a current Time Machine backup? If so, you can option key boot to that and restore also.
Click to expand...

I doubt when the machine boots up, the keyboard isn't getting recognised while I am holding the keys?
 
rocketman5803 said:
I am using a traditional keyboard, wired to mac mini via USB.
Click to expand...

If you have a Mini listed at the link I posted, then you may not have updated the firmware to handle Internet Recovery. If that is the case, you are going to need some sort of USB recovery key to boot from to get things going again.
 
Doesn't the 2011 do internetrecovery out of the box, even without firmware updates? And the 2010 has a drive and install disk, so that is no problem either.

If neither helps, buy Snow Leopard at Apple (20$), and do an install from disk (using Target mode if you don't have a DVD drive).
 
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