Hello, i recently got a black Macbook from 2006, and i can’t seem to reinstall mac os. I have never used a mac before in my life, only windows and linux. I tried command+r and command+alt+r, but neither work upon bootup. Any other ideas? I am running the latest verson of mac os available for this PC, 10.6.8
Just hold the option key down while booting and it should show you a boot menu.
Are you using the DVD to install Mac OS or are you using a USB drive?
no, i was just going to wipe the drive and reinstall using recovery mode. i do not own a mac os DVD or a USB stick.
Apple says if you can’t boot recovery you need to reinstall macOS after starting up from another disk or volume, or by using a bootable installer.
If it’s an early 2006 machine it does not support Lion and thus would not have a recovery at all. Recovery was introduced with 10.7 ( Lion ).
You may also be able to find an iso of the system software disks on the Internet Archive that you can burn to a DVD and use that in lieu of a USB installer.
Is it a macbook or a powerbook
It’s a black MacBook, it’s Intel.
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Are you trying to boot recovery? That was only introduced in 10.7.2 or .3, its not a thing in 10.6. However, you can get mac cleaner, then make a new account.
I would reccomend installing a linux distro like xubuntu and running that. Alternatively, you can harkintosh a laptop such as a lenovo y40-70 (I have a thread on how to do it and showing how I did it). Y40-70’s can be had for dirt cheap, but you won’t have dgpu. You can, however, run latest mac os.
Theres also mac postfacto, though idk if 10.7 has had a 32bit kernel made.
Alternatively, theres 10.7 core, which is a modded image of the 10.7 developer pleview. You have to reinstall it oncein a while because its the preview image, but you get abrecovery partition… I think.
Otherwise… Not many other options. I had a macbook 1,1 as a main laphop for a while, so I know almost every option xd.
Oh, and if you DO install linux or something, bootcamp may or may not work. So I’d reccomend burning a refit or refind image to have an alternate boot menu on a cd or dvd. Then you just hold c on boot and select your os. On my machine, maybe the black one is different idk, I had weird issues on boot with linux, so I had to boot an alternate menu. It worked fine and I could just take the cd out after. Nbd.
Goodluck brud.
I just ended up somewhat figuring it out. I used single user mode to reset the password, made a new account, and deleted all of the other users files. This actually works better because i can keep the 2008 versions of Garage Band and IMovie, as its not compatible with the newest versions. I also found an old 2gb stick of ddr2 RAM laying around that was the same speed as the others, so now it has 2.5gb of RAM, and is much more usable than having only 1gb. Thanks for all the help guys!
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Also the reason i bought this was to learn MacOS, even though i prefer Ubuntu. I want to expand my knowledge with computers, as i’d love to major in computer science and turn this hobby into a career.
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Does 10.6 run currently? Do you need an image?
My suggestion is that he waits for a decent deal on those new nvidia laptops… Will be great for productivity
Glad the op solved his issues though
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