A few questions before proceeding to uninstall/reinstall Mountain Lion

What do you wish to do? Uninstall or reinstall. These are quite different. The former implies you want to downgrade to a prior version of OS X. So please be specific.

No, please don't do that. Here's how you do one or the other:

Downgrade Lion/Mountain Lion to Snow Leopard

1. Boot from your Snow Leopard Installer Disc. After the installer

loads select your language and click on the Continue

button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the

Utilities menu.

2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the

mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status

of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then

the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART

info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on

the Partition tab in the DU main window.

3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions

from the drop down menu to one. Set the format type to Mac OS

Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the

partition scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Click on

the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.

4. Quit DU and return to the installer. Install Snow Leopard.

This will erase the whole drive so be sure to backup your files if you don't have a backup already. If you have performed a TM backup using Lion be aware that you cannot restore from that backup in Snow Leopard (see below.) I suggest you make a separate backup using Carbon Copy Cloner.

If you have Snow Leopard Time Machine backups, do a full system restore per #14 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions. If you have subsequent backups from Lion, you can restore newer items selectively, via the "Star Wars" display, per #15 there, but be careful; some Snow Leopard apps may not work with the Lion files.

Reinstalling Lion/Mountain Lion Without Erasing the Drive

Boot to the Recovery HD: Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.

Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions: Upon startup select Disk Utility from the main menu. Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions as follows.

When the recovery menu appears select Disk Utility. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the main menu.

Reinstall Lion/Mountain Lion: Select Reinstall Lion/Mountain Lion and click on the Continue button.

Note: You will need an active Internet connection. I suggest using Ethernet if possible because it is three times faster than wireless.

Install or Reinstall Lion/Mountain Lion from Scratch

Be sure you backup your files to an external drive or second internal drive because the following procedure will remove everything from the hard drive.

Boot to the Recovery HD:

Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.

Erase the hard drive:

1. Select Disk Utility from the main menu and click on the Continue button.

2. After DU loads select your startup volume (usually Macintosh HD) from the left side list. Click on

the Erase tab in the DU main window.

3. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Optionally, click on the Security button and set the Zero

Data option to one-pass. Click on the Erase button and wait until the process has completed.

4. Quit DU and return to the main menu.

Reinstall Lion: Select Reinstall Lion/Mountain Lion and click on the Install button.

Note: You will need an active Internet connection. I suggest using Ethernet if possible because it is three times faster than wireless.

I haven't the patience to read anything posted by ds store. Too wordy, too confusing, not too helpful.

Then if you don't find my suggestions useful return to your older discussion and continue to post there. Having marked the topic Solved does not prevent you from continuing in the same topic if you wish. If ds store has not turned off notifications he will be notified by email of any new posts in the topic.

Of course I will, just didn't notice it was there. Sorry.

"What adobe id do I enter when asked? I have inherited this computer from a designer friend who recently passed away, I have his adobe id and password, I have one of my own that I registered for this forum with. Also his friend who passed the computer to me was the one who upgraded the computer from Lion to Mountain Lion, so I don't know if she used a different password (she's in Missouri, I'm in Vancouver canada) to download the mountain Lion app. I also have my own user and computer name on the computer now and do know what his user admin name was as I deleted it in process of problems solving, I also have his password that used to access his user accounts.

So I''d like to know what to enter when I'm asked for adobe id and password, as I can't pay for a new os"

Are you referring to licensed Adobe products like Photoshop? If so, then I'm not sure it matters which you use insofar as you both have your own separate Adobe IDs and passwords. But you must have them for each Adobe licensed product since I don't believe Adobe has one license code for all its products. Frankly, I'm unsure what you are referring to as an Adobe ID nor for what Adobe products.

As for Mountain Lion and other App Store purchases that were made using someone else's Apple ID and password, you will need to purchase them using your Apple ID and password unless you have the Apple ID and password under which they were purchased. The licenses are not transferrable. The software will continue to work but you will not be able to upgrade them.

As long as you are installing or using software in your own user account with your own admin username and password, you will be OK.

Merielsea wrote:

I found ds store to be incredibly helpful

Merielsea,

I think you learned a lot, but I feel you need someone there to assist you as it's quite of lot of information your trying to absorb in such a short time, so it can be very intimidating or even confusing.

A local PC/Mac repair shop should be able to handle your computer issues no problem, then if there is a hardware problem, I would consider taking it to Apple as they have the parts.

Give yourself a rest and let the experienced fellows take care of you. 🙂

Later on if your interested you can read up, take your own time as it's a lot of information to take in, I'm trying to make it less complicated, but it's not like I can post videos here to show people how it should look doing certain software fixes so they can duplicate it at home.

Good Luck 🙂

are you talking about the apple id you use to sign into itunes? Or the log-on password to get to the OS?