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'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!
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!