mac mini boots to osx utilities screen

i'm a mac newbie who bought a mac mini from ebay. It is the newest model and the ad said it has mountain lion installed. when i turn the thing on it stops at the osx utilities screen. I tried all the options and nothing works to get the thing past this screen. no disks came with the machine so i can't do a clean install and an install from apple won't work since lion os purchase is not in my appleid. any ideas?

Starting with OS X Lion, there is a Recovery partition on your Mac that should allow you to restore the OS that came with it. So power down the Mac Mini and hold down CMD+r while powering it up to enter recovery mode. Then you should be able to restore OS X on there and get back to a working place..

thanks for the reply. i tired what you said and it brought me to the same osx utilities screen

Can you describe some of the text that's on there or show us an image so that we know what you are seeing?

attahed should be the screen image. the only one i can try is the disk utility but it says everything is ok when i verify

What happens when you click on Reinstall OS X?

Sure looks like nothing is installed on it and alas Lion or Mountain Lion stay the property of the purchaser via their App Store Account. Try what Oneironaut suggests and see if anything will install.

Failing that guess you will be in the market for an operating system. Note you also own an iMac. Any chance you run Lion or Mountain Lion and made a bootable USB thumb drive? If not you could go to your App Burn to a USB thumb drive before installing. Store Account and hold down Option and hit Purchases, and if either come up download again which will be no charge. You will need at least an 8GB thumb drive.


http://www.tuaw.com/2012/07/25/building-an-os-x-mountain-lion-installer-thumb-drive/

If you are trying to reinstall Mac OS X, the machine does need to have an internet connection at that time, preferably wired for speed, wireless is possible but in my experience, it's a little slow.

i contacted apple. I hard wire connected to the internet then did a cmd+option+R which eventually reinstalled LION (not mountain lion) i can live with this and may eventually upgrade but things are working ok with xcode 4.5 right now so i'll leave it alone for a while. thanks for everyone's help and suggestions

mjmebes, your mighty welcome, anytime