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Early 2011 Model: A1278 / 2.3 GHz i5 or 2.7 GHz i7 processor

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trying to reinstall os x lion but my hardrive is locked

i am forced to reinstall os x lion as my harddrive or mac has an issue.

my mac is not booting correctly so i do it in the save-mode (i speak german so i dont know the right term for it in english (however pressing alt+cmd+r+ turn on button). i can see that my HD is locked and i cant select it when i want to reinstall mac os xlion. in 'disk utility' i varified and repaired the disk and the message in SMART says verified, unfortunately i cant hit 'enable journaling' as its unclickable. please help me i need my files and i know they are there, ps. sorry i dont speak the mac-tech language, even if i used all this terms above, so please write as easy as possible :D

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short update about the verifying, i didnt do it on the macintosh hardware, but on the hardware that has been installed once it was broken, trying to do the varification and repair now, hope that makes sense

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didnt work, unfortunately i cant do a back up as my mac wont start properly!

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Enter your administrative user password to unlock the disk. Do not upgrade to El Capitan yet as the Disk Utility on that version will not do the job.

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thx, but where can i type in the password?

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Type it in when you use Disk Utility.

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can you give the step by step process of getting the hard disk unlocked?

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Maybe you can try diskwarrior, just search over the web (torr3nt) and youll find the boot dvd, maybe it works for you...

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hi makomail, thx ill try to search it on my ipad and let u know

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ok, just let me know about your progress...

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hi there, i went to the appel store, what they did was saving my documents (some or the most important ones got lost) to en external harddrive by creating two partitions, one for the backup and one for the system, through the new system i could drag and drop by data onto the external hd. then they set it up all new from scratch, i have my data now, but all aps and softwares are lost...well $@$* happens and inreally learned my lesson about backups!

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