MacBook a11278 operating system...help

theblagger

Hi got a mac book a11278 which I won at a auction, but has no operating system...can I download this from anywhere, or do I need to buy a disc...
I also need to get a hard drive...any help out there
Thanks

theblagger

Anyone help?

Figment

You can purchase and download most Apple Software from their App Store. I don't know if you can download it on a Windows PC so you may need another (working) Mac to do it.

If you've bought the Macbook without a hard disk or Operating System, how do you know it works?

Im_just_careful

I think a SATA disk is what you need then find someone who bought a similar Mac from new.

I've never tried it on mine but I believe the restore disk will just boot the machine and let you do a clean install.

NiftyDigits

As you can see, there are a lot of A1278 machines

Mondez

You will need a working mac to purchase and download the Lion (or mountain lion) installer and you will need to follow some online guides to make either bootable USB or a DVD from it in order to do a fresh install since the download as it stands needs an OS already installed to install from.
Hard drive as others have said should be a standard SATA laptop hard drive.

almillar

As above, any 2.5 inch laptop SATA hard drive will do the trick, that's easy.
OS isn't quite so easy because it's not distributed physically anymore, you have to download it through the App Store on a Mac. With an OS already there. See the problem?! What you need to do, without downloading illegally, is to buy a OSX.6 (Snow Leopard) DVD on eBay or something somewhere. Hopefully it's cheap. Once installed and updated, you'll have the Mac App store available. You can then go on with your Apple ID and purchase OSX.8 (Mountain Lion) which you can buy, download and upgrade to.

Notmyrealname

If you live within reasonable distance of an Apple store, pop in and say you wiped the drive and then realised you couldn't find your recovery discs. They may just have a set handy.