when i turn on my mac and press the alt key, i don't have any partitions to choose

Question

Level 1

0 points

when i turn on my mac and press the alt key, i don't have any partitions to choose

Hello.😟

I bought my macbook pro retina display 15 one week ago and installed the windows, then one day When i turned on my mac and pressed the alt key to choose Macintosh HD or Windows, i didn't see any of the options. trying to remember i think that all that happened when i was trying to delete the windows because it was not working properly and by accident deleted both of them .

when i press option+r this is what i see:

i have 4 options the first is restore but i don't have a backup, the 2nd in reinstall but when i try it i have the error "could not write installation information to disk. contact apple care",the 3rd i dont see any help online and finally disk utility. when i go to disk utility i see this

and then i see this

as you can see i only have 251 gb apple ssd sm35... and untitled option

i hope someone can help to solve this problem because i'm really afraid that my hard drive is totally damaged.

Thank you.

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8), its a new mac

Posted on Jun 4, 2013 11:06 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Kurt Lang

Level 9

57,822 points

Jun 4, 2013 11:16 AM in response to ginofromfl

The only remaining logical drive (partition) is labeled Untitled, which tells me OS X is seeing it as a FAT32 (MS-DOS) drive. Which would also be why you can't choose it to install OS X to. Less likely, wrong partition map, but I'll explain that next.

So, you're going to have to run Disk Utility first. Click on the physical drive (the left indented name of the hardware) and repartition it. Change Current to 1 Partition so it activates the Options button. Click that and make sure the Partition Map is GUID. Change it if necessary and click OK. Make sure the drive format is Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Click Apply. Exit out of Disk Utility.

You should now be able to choose the new partition to reinstall OS X to.

Reply