is there a way to permanently change the default language on a russian macbook to english?

[doctorevil30564]

My roommate bought a used mid 2010 model russian macbook pro (with the keyboard showing Cyrillic characters in addition to the english ones.

When we replaced the bad hard drive in it and tried to load it with a fresh copy of mountain lion it booted off the thumbdrive ok but displayed everything in russian. is there a way to change the language options in EFI or by changing the keyboard so it fully displays in english by default.

I was able to get thru the installer due to being familiar on what buttons to push in the partition tool and in the OSX installer but don't want to have to mess with this everytime he needs me to help him with it if OSX gets screwed up and needs to be reloaded on a freshly formatted partion. I was able to switch it to english for the most part the only things I still see in russian is in the system info where instead of saying Intel Core 2 Duo Intel is in Cyrillic, and the hard drive size doesn't say 1 TB the TB is displayed in Cyrillic

I noted that when I booted it holding down the option key the screen for recovery was also displaying in Cyrillic russian characters so it seems to be coming from the EFI.

Or does EFI pick it up from the type of keyboard that is installed in the laptop? If we change the keyboard to a US english one would it fix this?

 

[beelzebozo]

My roommate bought a used mid 2010 model russian macbook pro (with the keyboard showing Cyrillic characters in addition to the english ones.

When we replaced the bad hard drive in it and tried to load it with a fresh copy of mountain lion it booted off the thumbdrive ok but displayed everything in russian. is there a way to change the language options in EFI or by changing the keyboard so it fully displays in english by default.

I was able to get thru the installer due to being familiar on what buttons to push in the partition tool and in the OSX installer but don't want to have to mess with this everytime he needs me to help him with it if OSX gets screwed up and needs to be reloaded on a freshly formatted partion. I was able to switch it to english for the most part the only things I still see in russian is in the system info where instead of saying Intel Core 2 Duo Intel is in Cyrillic, and the hard drive size doesn't say 1 TB the TB is displayed in Cyrillic

I noted that when I booted it holding down the option key the screen for recovery was also displaying in Cyrillic russian characters so it seems to be coming from the EFI.

Or does EFI pick it up from the type of keyboard that is installed in the laptop? If we change the keyboard to a US english one would it fix this?

See this: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4102

Not sure if it will help. You can run terminal from the installation.

 

[doctorevil30564]

See this: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4102

Not sure if it will help. You can run terminal from the installation.

It seems to have worked, when I logged out the login screen has fully switched to english, and the few remaining bits that were still showing up in cyrillic had switched to english.

I wonder though if this would work from the OSX installer, or if by doing this did it flip the necessary bit in the EFI that determines what language the OSX installer starts up in on a system with a blank hard drive.

I may have to investigate this further, if my roommate will let me zero the drive and start over with a fresh install.