there was something you said I had to hold down to get to recovery disk but it looked like symbols, so I don't know what you were trying to say. Take a look. ......option key or ⌘R at startup.... What is that word between "or" and "at'?
It's "command" R, where "command" is the cloverleaf symbol you see next to the word "command" on the keys on either side of the spacebar.
The "cloverleaf" (of the freeway variety, not the shamrock variety) is actually the Unicode "PLACE OF INTEREST SIGN". Your signature says you're running Safari on OS X, which should have no trouble properly displaying Unicode symbols. Is there something odd about your browser setup that's not reflected in your signature?
In Safari, look at the View->Text Encoding menu. Select "Default" if it isn't already checked, then reload the page and see if things look better.
You should see:
⌘ is the command symbol (cloverleaf)
⌥ is the option symbol
⇧ is the shift symbol (a hollow up-pointing arrow)
→ is a thin right-pointing arrow, useful for expressing hierarchical selections
(For example, instead of writing View->Text Encoding, I'd usually write View→Text Encoding, not only because the true arrow looks a little nicer, but because faking the arrow with hyphen-greater can leave you with a line break between - and >, which is just plain ugly. Not the program's fault; the semantic meaning of hyphen is "if you need to put in a line break, here's a good place to do it.")
