How to format MCP running lion?

Question

im selling my MBP and i want to give it to the perosn clean of all my stuff and just have lion on it.
how do i do this when there is no disk?

Answer 1

Apple has been changing the way they control Mac OS X. They have always avoided blatant control through registration and serial numbers for the software, but I expect they have been accumulating "crowd-sourced" statistics on where Mac OS X was being installed.
Traditionally, the DVD in the box with a new Mac would only boot that model (it was missing drivers for every Mac) so it did not get sold or traded as readily. The "Full Retail" DVDs would boot any model, but if you bought it, you probably wanted the DVD and were fairly likley to keep the DVD rather than sell it on to someone else. And traditionally, that Retail DVD cost about US$130 or so.
New information I learned recently leads me to believe that when a DVD still came in the box with a new Mac, it would still only boot the exact model it shipped with, but only a certain range of serial numbers. (This may be to reduce use of bundled software in "Hackintosh" PCs with a similar design.) For a variety of reasons, the price of a full retail DVD was dramatically reduced to under US$40, and the "Family Pack" for up to five Macs (at a slightly higher price) was introduced.
Now along comes the iTunes model for music, and the emerging model where you release copies of the "software" (music in the basic model) and now once you have bought it you can just re-download it and re-use it as often as you like. But you cannot sell it to your neighbor. And the cost is even cheaper, which tends to make it too much trouble to steal or sell it, "just buy your own, it's cheap."
So I told you that story to tell you this one:
• Erase the Hard Drive with one pass of Write Zeroes and no one can recover any of your old data, unless they dis-assemble the drive in a clean room and apply a lot of expensive technology to get back some of the data.
• Install Mac OS X 10.6 from a DVD and fully update it to 10.6.8.
Now If you choose to install 10.7, under the new model, it will be tied to your Apple-ID. If they have trouble or need to re-install it, they will need to buy a new copy.
My recommendation: If I were doing it, I would stop at 10.6.8 and point out it was "10.7 ready" and point out to the buyer they can get their own legal copy via  download for only US$30.