Clean install of Lion, new Apple ID My friend has just bought an iMac off eBay, but the hard drive wasn't fully wiped - it came with the guy's user account and was obviously registered with his Apple ID still.

What we want to do is install OSX again, but first, format the drive. This is simple and I've done it before but the question is will the installer let me do this? My friend hasn't owned a machine with Lion before and I've read in several places that the Apple ID has to have a copy of Lion registered to it for the transaction to work.

Is this possible? We'd be doing it using the recovery partition.

Cheers
The simple way is to use wipe the drive then use Internet Recovery to reinstall the OS. Internet Recovery will always download a copy of the original version of OS X that the Mac came with regardless of Apple ID, etc. Once the OS is installed, upgrade it to Mavericks for free using your Apple ID.


Boot into Internet Recovery using ⌘⌥R.
Erase and Install OS X.
Once the installation is complete, go to the App Store and download and install Mavericks.