OS X install media?

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joblo37pam

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Jun 28, 2002
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Let me preface this post by saying that I am a PC guy through and through. My experience with Macs is very limited, but with the help of Google, I can usually make them do what I need to...not in this case.

I have a customer with a MBP that had a hard drive go belly up during a Lion upgrade and now just hangs at the spinny apple thing. He has no install or recovery media. I have no macs that I can log into the app store and download the installer to create media with.

I can boot to both recovery partition on the old drive and the online recovery thingamajig. When I try to image the old drive to the new drive using the disk utility, it errors out with an I/O error. I have also tried imaging the drive using Ghost and Paragon, but both had I/O errors and neither one gave me a bootable system.

When I try to do the 'Reinstall Mac OS' option in the recovery utility, it will either sit at the 'Loading Installation Information' for hours if booted from the recovery partition of the old drive or say 'an error occurred while preparing the installation' if booted from the online recovery utility.

I would really love to just pop in some media and start an install, but that doesn't seem to be an option. I'm at somewhat of a loss as to what to try next. I would really prefer not to have to resort to P2P/Torrent for something as critical as an OS. Do I have any other legit options other than Apple's $69 USB key w/Lion?

Thanks
 
If you have the Lion installer app file downloaded, right click it, show package contents, then extract the InstallESD.dmg file. That's the installer image that can be made into a bootable DVD or USB flash drive. Use your favorite OS X disc burning app to make a DVD (requires DL media due to size) or use Disk Utility to make a bootable USB drive.

If you don't have the Lion installer app (or some place it was restored to), you can't really make the install media.
 
My Google-flu told me that, too, but I have neither the installer file nor a functioning os x install to open it and burn it with
 
put the new drive into the macbook and use the internet recovery

it's held in the EFI firmware not on the hard drive so you can swap drives and still access it
 
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4718

OS X Internet Recovery

If you happen to encounter a situation in which you cannot start from the Recovery System, such as your hard drive stopped responding or you installed a new hard drive without OS X installed, new Mac models introduced after public availability of OS X Lion or OS X Mountain Lion, automatically use the OS X Internet Recovery feature if the Recovery System (Command-R method above) doesn't work. OS X Internet Recovery lets you start your Mac directly from Apple's Servers. The system runs a quick test of your memory and hard drive to ensure there are no hardware issues.
Click to expand...
 
joblo37pam said:
As I mentioned in the OP, I just get an error when using the online utility.
Click to expand...
If you are actually removing the old hard drive from the macbook and installing the new hard drive into the macbook before trying to use the online recovery and then still getting an error the problem is not the hard drive.
 
Its possible that there is more wrong, but the drive had lots of bad sectors. It needed to be replaced anyway.

The error message comes immediately when it tries to verify the license, but doesn't reference a license problem.
 
there is no license to verify

from your description it sounds like the old hard drive is still accessible by the mac. Have you completely removed it from the computer?

if you have the old drive completely removed from the mac, not connected in any way, sitting on the shelf, and you're still getting an error when you try to use the online recovery then the problem is something else like the logic board

if you can't get the install to work then take the macbook into an apple store
they'll have the tools to do a proper diagnostic and to re-image the new drive
 
mope54 said:
there is no license to verify
Click to expand...

That's what I thought, but it says that it is 'checking eligibility'

The closest Apple Store is 500 miles away

I let it sit at the 'Loading Installation Information' over the weekend, thinking maybe it was just downloading really slow, but no luck. I would be satisfied if I could get into the app store and download the installer from a PC, but alas, that would be too much to ask.
 
ok try this

make sure the old hard drive is completely removed from the macbook
start recovery and open terminal from the Utilities menu and type

date 042109582011

then try recovery again
 
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