Restore my MacBook 15-inch Earlier 2011

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.

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.

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?

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.