Deleted start up and attempted to reinstall

[Lex789]

Hello, so I’ve botched my Mac up. I deleted the start up disc ready for selling and I’ve totally made a pigs ear out of installing it again.
Is there a way to delete this and start again?
The computer manages to boot up, but it’s in the old school software (white leopard or something?) I can’t appear to search many websites. I try and download the latest software and it says there’s an error. Can it be fixed?

MacBook Air 2013

 

[TonyAguila]

Hello, so I’ve botched my Mac up. I deleted the start up disc ready for selling and I’ve totally made a pigs ear out of installing it again.
Is there a way to delete this and start again?
The computer manages to boot up, but it’s in the old school software (white leopard or something?) I can’t appear to search many websites. I try and download the latest software and it says there’s an error. Can it be fixed?

MacBook Air 2013

Your MacBook Air, either size, should be able to run macOS Big Sur. You will need to have an internet connection to do a Recovery. From shutdown, start the Mac and immediately hold down ⌘-C until it brings you to Recovery. Open Disk Utility and erase the startup drive, selecting APFS for the format. Afterwards, go to reinstall macOS. It should offer to install Big Sur.

Go through the motions all the way up to when it asks to migrate data back. Exit. To test if the installation was successful, boot up and it should bring you to where it asks for your information, much like it did when you start up a brand new Mac. Shut down. It should be ready to resell.

One thing you should do before trying to erase the Mac for resale or give away is to turn off Find My in system settings.

 

[Lex789]

Hi Tony,

Thank you for your response. There isn’t such option for APFS.

Mac OS extended (journaled) etc etc

 

[TonyAguila]

Hi Tony,

Thank you for your response. There isn’t such option for APFS.

Mac OS extended (journaled) etc etc

I’m assuming you are trying to erase the internal drive of the MacBook Air. Boot into Recovery again and launch Disk Utility. The screen grabs I will show will be from the running macOS version of Disk Utility, but it should be fairly similar to Disk Utility in Recovery. From the main Disk Utility widow, top left of the main window, you will see the View dropdown menu. Select Show All Devices. To completely erase the drive, you must have the top level selected (something like “APPLE SSD … …”). Right-click on the device and select Erase…

Choose APFS with default parameters. Change “Untitled” to whatever you want to name it. It will appear under Container disk# with the name you supplied (ventura ß1 in my example). You may wish to call it Macintosh HD. When done, proceed to install macOS Big Sur.