Macbook Pro mid-2012 - can't restore OS - any ideas?

Poolybit

Poolybit

Poolybit

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I need to start this with stating that macs are not my area of expertise at all so treat me like a complete beginner!

I'm hoping that someone will have some ideas on what could be wrong (or what I'm doing wrong!) in trying to get a Macbook Pro back up and running with an O/S on it. My neighbour asked me to have a look at their machine stating that it hadn't worked since their daughter did something to it so I don't exactly know what has happened to it in the past.

Initial symptoms were that it was booting to a folder icon with a question mark in it which, from googling about, suggested that it had no bootable O/S on it. The only key boot commands that I can get the mac to respond to is for internet recovery which loads up and seems to have all the options available. Selecting a fresh install of Lion seems to fail with a message that everywhere seems to suggest is because apple goofed on some certificates and you can't use internet recovery to restore older machines now ("Failed to download additional components" and shows a download estimate of about -2000000000 hours before failing). Few other notes from the internet recovery section, I have erased and rebuilt the hard drive multiple times without any issues using the 'disk utility' section, it shows a 1tb WD blue drive in there so I think that must have been swapped in at somepoint.

Everywhere online seems to suggest that the next step is to use a USB stick to restore the O/S which I have prepped in the way that everyone has suggested on a windows machine (TransMac, finding the latest High Sierra DMG and creating the bootable disk). The main issue I then get is holding the 'option' key on boot only ever launches the internet recovery route again, I never see the startup manager that everywhere suggests that I should see... If I hold nothing down, it boots to the missing folder screen and if I hold down any of the hot keys to do ... anything, it launches internet reccovery. This means I can't get the USB to start the install.

I have done the PRAM and SMC reset routines as well without any change in the process. Any ideas?? Thanks in advance for any assistance!
 
I did read about that but also read if you use the internet recovery option, it autosets the datetime and overwrites anything :( Sadly there is no recovery partition on the drive to do it that way because it was completely wiped when I got it! I will give it a go anyway, if I can get anything running on there at all, hopefully it'll be fine. Cheers!
 
Well mine was on an old 2009 iMac, needed to be factory reset and a fresh install via recovery. Would download the OS ( El Capitan) but would fail with 'Failed to download additional components required'.

From there I opened up a terminal via utilities , checked date ( date ) and then changed it ( 'date 102810242016' for example) . Rebooted and it completed downloading the additional components and stopped at the setup screen for a new user.
 
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Great, thanks again. I have been trying loads of different bits and pieces and I foolishly trusted some post somewhere that said that the date workaround doesn't work for internet recovery so never tried it! Just firing up the macbook now to give it a go. I will be both annoyed and happy if it works because I wasted time farting around with Mac bootable USBs with no need!
 
Yep, easy as that! Thanks so much, now going through the upgrade path to the latest OS for them from 10.7... Really appreciated, was banging my head trying to get it to boot from USB. Everywhere suggested that the startup manager was part of the laptop ROM but it works fine now so I guess it needs the OS to work.
 
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