reinstalling my stolen, now recovered Macbook

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 ZeroData 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/Mountain 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.

Highly recommend you erase the drive before installing anything.

Secure erase the drive will do it.

-> http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3680

Select the Zero Data option in Step 3. One pass is all that's required.

I don't know why you need to do more. If you've erased the drive and reinstalled OS X, then you are fine. You are worrying over nothing.

I understand. What you've done thus far should be fine. Only if this thief were a very bright hacker who installed something in the boot block of the hard drive (like what some tracking software does) would there be anything about which to be concerned. Unlikely that's the case in your situation. Were that a concern, then the only solution is to replace the hard drive and start from scratch. I really don't think you need be that concerned. 🙂