Q: Installing osx to a non osx mac

Since it came with Snow Leopard, you'll have to boot to the gray DVD the Mac came with, repartition the hard drive as GUID and format it as Mac OS Extended. Then reinstall OS X. Update that to 10.6.8 with the Combo updater. From there, you can access your App Store account again and reinstall Mavericks (assuming that's your goal since you posted in the Mavericks forum).

Your Mac came with 10.6.6, so the retail Snow Leopard disk can't be used. That disk is 10.6.3 and won't have the hardware drivers on it for your Mac. As such, it will refuse to install.

You're going to have to call Apple's Customer Support and order replacement system disks for your Mac. They'll ask for the serial number to make sure you get the right ones. Expect the two DVDs and shipping to run you about $35 - $40.

Your only free option is if you have a bootable clone of your last Mac OS on another drive. Then you could boot to that, reformat the main drive and clone it back.

Edit: Free option number 2. If you have another Mac available, you can download Mavericks through your App Store account to that Mac. Don't let it install. Press Command+Q to quit the installer when the download is complete and it automatically launches. Then get yourself an 8 GB flash drive and use DiskMaker X to create a bootable Mavericks installer. You can then use that to reformat the hard drive and reinstall Mavericks directly.

You're welcome.

No problem. When you boot to the first gray OS X installer DVD, you'll eventually get the standard menu bar at the top. As soon as it appears (you may have to click past a couple of other questions or screens first), launch Disk Utility. In the left pane, click on the far left physical hard drive icon, which should be your internal drive, assuming you have no external drives connected and turned on. Anything indented to the right underneath the physical drive is a logical partition on that drive. Like so:

With the physical drive highlighted, you'll have the Partition tab at the right. Click that. Where the drop down menu above the graphic representation of the drive says Current, change it to something else, even if the drive already is one large partition and you still only want one. Select 1 Partition from the menu. That will now allow you to click the Options button below the graphic. Make sure the GUID Partition Map radio button is selected and click OK.

All new partitions you create will automatically be assigned as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). If you made more than one, you can resize them by dragging the divider line between the partitions, or clicking on a partition graphic and manually typing in a size at the right. When you have everything the way you want it, click Apply. This will only take about 20 seconds.

You can then quit Disk Utility, which will return you to the DVD's desktop and continue on installing Snow Leopard.

A late 2011 MBP came with Lion (10.7).  OPTION + COMMAND + R should work.

Ciao.

Ah! Yes, that's what www.everymac.com says. I usually go to them first since they are normally very accurate. Can't remember what site I was on that said it came with 10.6.6.

So, reisyan15, you don't need to contact Apple for disks at all. Once you gave them the serial number, they would have told you the same thing. Which means you can get it back to OS X now by restarting and holding down the Command+Option+R keys, as OGELTHORPE noted.

You will get the Recovery mode work screen. From there, you can follow the same general directions above for repartitioning the drive with Disk Utility (it will be a choice in the central work screen) and making it GUID. Then install OS X. Lion, 10.7.x should be installed from Apple's servers.

Excellent! From there, this is what I would recommend if you're going to install Yosemite.

Once Lion is installed, use your App Store account to download Yosemite. Don't let it install when the installer launches. Press Command+Q to quit. The Yosemite installer should still be in the Applications folder.

Next, download DiskMaker X to create a bootable Yosemite installer from your App Store download onto an 8 GB flash drive.

Lastly, boot to the completed bootable flash drive and use Disk Utility to erase the main drive, and then install Yosemite. Since you need to wait for the full install of Yosemite anyway, may as well have it installed clean on an erased drive instead of patching over an older OS.