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Restore my MacBook 15-inch Earlier 2011

Hello everyone,


Please, this is to ask for your help.


I purchased an SSD disk and installed it into my MacBook Pro 15-inch Earlier 2011. After that, I tried to install the last OS permitted for this device, pressing opt+cmp+R and turn it on. When I selected the option to install a new copy of OS, the process try to download OS X Lion, but after few seconds, a display appeared with this message: "Can't download the additional components needed to install Mac OS X."


I think that buying a mac computer gives me the right to install the operating system allowed on that device as many times as necessary, without having to pay anything. I have tried downloading Lion or Mountain Lion OSX, but it has a cost of USD 18.

How can I restore my MacBook Pro to Lion OS X?

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 10.12

Posted on Sep 11, 2020 12:56 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Sep 11, 2020 5:50 PM

While Recovery Mode and Internet Recovery Mode are great options I've found that these recovery modes do not always work as intended. Many times instead of installing the current or maximum version of macOS as described, Internet Recovery Mode will default instead to the oldest OS still "available" from Apple. Unfortunately macOS 10.7 Lion is a problematic OS when attempting to reinstall it as I've seen lots of threads on these forums with people having issues.


The best thing would be to boot your original drive and download the macOS installer. Or you can do this using another Mac that is compatible with macOS 10.11 or 10.13. Then you can create a bootable macOS USB installer using the instructions in this Apple article:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372


You can also use Internet Recovery Mode to restore from a Time Machine backup.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203981#macos


Another option assuming the original drive is functional and not failing would be to clone the original drive using Carbon Copy Cloner.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Sep 11, 2020 5:50 PM in response to rodrifonsi

While Recovery Mode and Internet Recovery Mode are great options I've found that these recovery modes do not always work as intended. Many times instead of installing the current or maximum version of macOS as described, Internet Recovery Mode will default instead to the oldest OS still "available" from Apple. Unfortunately macOS 10.7 Lion is a problematic OS when attempting to reinstall it as I've seen lots of threads on these forums with people having issues.


The best thing would be to boot your original drive and download the macOS installer. Or you can do this using another Mac that is compatible with macOS 10.11 or 10.13. Then you can create a bootable macOS USB installer using the instructions in this Apple article:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372


You can also use Internet Recovery Mode to restore from a Time Machine backup.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203981#macos


Another option assuming the original drive is functional and not failing would be to clone the original drive using Carbon Copy Cloner.

Sep 11, 2020 6:48 PM in response to HWTech

HWTech--


in support of what you said about Internet Recovery, that article you cited contains this disclaimer:


macOS Recovery exceptions

The version of macOS offered by macOS Recovery might vary in some cases:

  • If macOS Sierra 10.12.4 or later has never been installed on this Mac, Option-Command-R installs the macOS that came with your Mac, or the closest version still available. And Shift-Option-Command-R isn't available.


Sep 11, 2020 1:48 PM in response to rodrifonsi

It sounds like you may be having a similar problem to what I am having with a mid-2015, trying to do Recovery to an external drive with no internal OEM drive. In my case I'm getting an error message about a "missing firmware partition". The point is that there may be issues with using non-Apple SSDs, because they either do not have the firmware partition, or maybe aren't supported by the current firmware in the system.


Do you by chance have a SATA hard drive you can try this with to see if it will work on that?


What brand/model of SSD did you buy, and what is the model number and EMC code for your Macbook?

Sep 11, 2020 5:40 PM in response to countzero123

countzero123 wrote:

It sounds like you may be having a similar problem to what I am having with a mid-2015, trying to do Recovery to an external drive with no internal OEM drive. In my case I'm getting an error message about a "missing firmware partition". The point is that there may be issues with using non-Apple SSDs, because they either do not have the firmware partition, or maybe aren't supported by the current firmware in the system.

No, this issue is different than the issue you are having with the Retina model laptop with a proprietary PCIe SSD.

Restore my MacBook 15-inch Earlier 2011

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