Is my mac completely dead?

[Elite Bmx]

Hey guys, I have a question. A year or so ago, my school gave our late 2009? i believe, macbooks away for 150$ a pop, and I had to jump on that, but I disabled the spotlight and I figured hey why not reset the operating system, which completely was the wrong decision.

- it boots up to Recovery mode, nothing else
- Disk drive is malfunctioning,
- I tried doing a factory reset but it instead of :/root it shows -sh-3.2# [[says device is write locked]]
- I have OSX snow leopard disk, as well as an account with mountain lion & neither of them have worked
- the mountain lion says that the item is unavailable at this time
- the disk wont read from my disk drive, & i don't have an external
-

any way of salvaging this?
i have a few USB sticks I've tried formatting on windows 7 & using disk utility to get an osx but nothing has worked for me

ANY sort of help would be muchly appreciated

thank you! - Josh

 

[oldscribe]

Hi,

Buy or borrow an external disk drive then reinstall SL.
Or get someone with a Mac to download the mountain lion installer and then make a bootable USB stick.
Either should work just fine.

 

[Elite Bmx]

Is there any other way to make a bootable usb stick without the use of another mac?
Thanks though, I appreciate it!

 

[oldscribe]

Hi,
So one on the forum was going to try a win pc but did not post back results, personally I do not see this as the usb stick needs formatting correctly IE Guid etc.