Your assumptions were right about Recovery being a separate partition. How did you erase the disk, from withing the recovery partition? If so, the recovery partition must still be there.
Select the disk to erase. To erase everything on your Mac, you usually should choose the main hard drive named Macintosh HD. If the Mac is running High Sierra or later, Disk Utility will show all the Macs linked with your Apple ID under Macintosh HD. So be careful not to delete the drive of other Macs. Then you need to enter name. Erase your hard drive. Once Time Machine has finished backing up your files, safely disconnect your drive by opening Finder, then click the eject symbol next to the drive name. Is there a way how I can erase my Hard Drive without recovery HD? You don't say why you want to erase it. It may be possible to create another volume without loss of existing data. You can then put another OS on the new volume and erase the old one. OS X 10.5.8 can boot from USB sticks and other external USB devices. How to remove a partition on your Mac. After following the steps to erase a partition, you can then remove it from your hard drive. Select your main partition, which is the first drive on the list. It might be called 'Fusion' or 'Macintosh HD.' Click Partition.
Can you still boot into Recovery HD? Try restarting while holding down the 'Option' key rather than 'command-r'.
Do you get any bootable disks? You should get the recovery partition. How to boot macbook air from usb.
If so, boot into it. Go to Disk Utility and do 'Repair Disk'. Do it more than once if necessary, or until no more errors show. Once the disk is repaired, choose 'Reinstall OS X Lion' from within recovery. You need to have an active internet connection in order for this to work.
How To Erase My Macbook Pro Hard Drive Hard Drive
How To Erase My Macbook Pro Hard Drive Mac
In the event that you can't get any joy, an Apple store will reinstall it for you. If your machine is less than 12 months old, they should do this for free.
