Restore of Mac OS X Lion to mid-2011 Macbook Air fails

Background: The Macbook Air 11-inch (mid-2011) I bought for my daughter has not seen much use over the past couple of years and the battery was bulging and needed replacement. I wanted to keep this handy little laptop so I installed a replacement battery from OWC and then reformatted the HD to start over. However, I cannot restore OS X Lion. Using Mac OS X Utilities the process appears to go as intended until immediately after the Macintosh SSD is selected as the destination drive (by the way, that drive was verified by Disk Utility as good). The estimated time for the install is displayed as "-2,147,483,648 hours and 11 minutes remaining". Then it changes to "0 seconds remaining" before reverting to that ridiculously large negative number and back several time. Then a message window displays that reads "Can't download the additional components needed to install Mac OS X".

Is Mac OS X Lion no longer available as a restoration download from Apple? This laptop will not run Catalina, so what do I do? Any advice would be appreciated.

Posted on Aug 28, 2020 1:00 PM

Top-ranking reply

HWTech

Level 9

68,768 points

Posted on Sep 4, 2020 5:36 PM

SIBoyd wrote:

Using the article you provided by link as guidance I made an OS X El Capitan installer on a USB using another Macbook Air (mid-2013) that I recently installed El Capitan on. I booted my Macbook Air 2011 using that install USB, went through the process to install El Capitan on the MB Air. The process started and then stopped right after choosing the computer's disk as the installation destination and displayed the following error message, "This copy of the Install OS X El Capitan application can't be verified. It may have been corrupted or tampered with during downloading." So, installation of El Capitan also won't work.

Did you perform a clean install by first erasing the SSD using Disk Utility before clicking "Reinstall macOS"? Erase the SSD as GUID partition and MacOS Extended (Journaled). With the El Capitan you may need to select the "Partition" tab/button as described in this OWC document:

https://www.owcdigital.com/assets/support/support-formatting-and-migration/Mac_Formatting_6-10.pdf

Try using a different USB stick since the quality of many USB sticks is quite poor and it may have corrupted the installer.

View in context

Similar questions

16 replies

HWTech

Level 9

68,768 points

Sep 4, 2020 5:41 PM in response to kenzie0312

kenzie0312 wrote:

what if i do not have another mac?

Someone else recently posted a link to instructions to manually creating a macOS 10.11 USB installer by manually extracting the contents of the downloaded .dmg file from Apple. The instructions are a bit hard to understand if you are unfamiliar with the command line. I'm trying to rewrite the instructions to make it easier to create a macOS 10.11 USB installer without a compatible Mac. I can try modifying those instructions so they will easily work with a Linux Live USB boot disk instead for those users without another Mac, but it will take some time to create the instructions and test. I'm currently quite busy at work, but this is actually a fun side project that is also useful to me so I will see what I can do.

This thread has been closed by the system or the community team. You may vote for any posts you find helpful, or search the Community for additional answers.

Restore of Mac OS X Lion to mid-2011 Macbook Air fails