Fix an apple laptop

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epr

244 posts

Master Geek

Subscriber

#232122 30-Mar-2018 17:24

Hey all my sister's partners son reset her laptop because reasons, now if you let it boot it brings up a white screen with a line through a circle sign (like a no dogs allowed symbol without a dog in it) I have tried reinstalling using the in built tool but it requires an apple id sign-in and the one we have doesn't seem to work , is there any way we can find out what apple id it needs or any way we can get around this? My sister knows nothing about computers and i know very little about macs so i am kind of stuck.

Sam91

608 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1986185 30-Mar-2018 20:36

I believe you need an Apple ID that owns the OSX you're wanting to install. Do you have access to another mac?

- If yes, go here

- Sign into your Apple ID

- Search for "High Sierra"

- Click "download" or whatever it says under it.

After that, your Apple ID owns the OSX, so you should be able to log in this time and reinstall the operating system.

nitrotech

1256 posts

Uber Geek

#1986212 30-Mar-2018 23:11

If you’ve booted into recovery and it’s trying to reinstall an older os it will fail unless your Apple ID has been used to install that is before.

You could try ‘internet recovery’ but in general the best way to solve the issue is to create a bootable USB stick with the latest os, if you don’t have a working Mac this is going to be difficult.

Maybe a trip to your local computer store to get them to do a reinstall might be the easiest.

epr

244 posts

Master Geek

Subscriber

#1986225 31-Mar-2018 07:19

Cool guys thanks for that, I may have access to an apple laptop or pc in the near future just wanting to check the laptop my sister has is about 7 years old do I have to log in and get access to a certain version of the software and is there any gotchas for the machine I use to log in to I need to avoid. Once again thank you for the help.

antoniosk

2044 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Subscriber

#1986263 31-Mar-2018 09:23

epr: Cool guys thanks for that, I may have access to an apple laptop or pc in the near future just wanting to check the laptop my sister has is about 7 years old do I have to log in and get access to a certain version of the software and is there any gotchas for the machine I use to log in to I need to avoid. Once again thank you for the help.

Eamon

Try this: http://www.idownloadblog.com/2016/02/24/how-to-start-mac-recovery-mode/

There are many similar articles on the web about how to recover a MAC, but in my experience they are robust and very flexible, UNLESS the disk has failed and you have to start from scratch.

Re logging in, Apple started pushing all it's customers to 'using' icloud across all platforms, mac included. You could convert local login on the machine to an icloud login, which can help with recovery. Again, IF it had been setup. Win10 has gone this way to.

Good luck, you'll probably find the boot partition has been deselected by accident.

________

Antonios K

Behodar

7067 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#1986267 31-Mar-2018 09:47

antoniosk: Good luck, you'll probably find the boot partition has been deselected by accident.

I think you get a "?" icon in that case; a "not allowed" sign would indicate that it's found a bootable partition but that it's failed to boot.

As mentioned above, Internet Recovery might do the trick. Unlike the "on-disk" recovery, Internet Recovery does not require an Apple ID (unless you're on a system more than about six years old). Reboot and hold Command-Option-R at the chime, and you should get a message saying "Starting Internet Recovery".