virtualbox.org

so i have a dual drive mac mini, a 2010. i am running lion on the original hard drive and windows 7 on an ssd. like an idiot, when formatting some external storage drives to NTFS i mistakenly clicked on the drive with lion on it, wiping out the mac os. i now have a dual boot mini that only has windows on it. i figured out how to format the drive back to HFS+ on windows 7 so it can re-install lion on it. now i just have to figure out how to get lion back on it. most guides i read are about hacking lion onto a pc, which is NOT what i am trying to do (if i was i would just follow those guides). i actually have a mac mini, just no OS on it now. so can i just use something like virtualbox to load lion straight on to it seeing as how it is a mac to start with? is there another way to do this? thanx in advance for any help!

You need to install OS X natively on the host drive, so AFAICS you shouldn't be thinking about VirtualBox at all. The obvious step seems to be to contact Apple for support on how to reinstall a zapped OS X image. Or, go on an Apple forum.

thanx for that mpack. i had a feeling i was going to have to go to apple for this, i know they can re-install it. i will get my wallet ready

Well, I also suggested an Apple forum. Surely even Apple users occasionally need to replace or reformat their hard drive. And I assume that Apple don't operate like the cheapo end of the Windows PC market, bundling system restore CDs but not actual OS setup disks.

Incidentally, moving this topic to "Mac hosts".

Unless you also zapped the recovery partition that Apple installs when you install Lion you could just restart the mini, holding down the option key when you do it. Then select the Recovery HD and use it to reinstall the Lion OS.

thanx to you also, i got the same advice at apple's forums. i thought it wouldn't work, since i did kill the install partition also. lucky for me, apple protects dumb ***** and it automatically kicks you to an online backup that reinstalls the partition from their servers. not a huge fan of apple but pretty slick actually. all is well now

edit: BTW reformatting the drive back to HFS+ was NOT necessary and actually that is how i killed the partition in the first place. once you do the recovery (whether from partition or online) it will take you to apple's disc tools to format your drive properly before it starts recovery.