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can't see my hard drive when trying to reinstall mountain lion

In trying to restore my MacBook to factory settings, I turned off the computer before reinstalling the OS. this forces me to reinstall from the internet.


I go through the steps and when it comes to the "select the disk where you want to install OS X". I have nothing to choose from. Normally there would be a picture of the hard drive.




Posted on Dec 6, 2020 10:36 AM

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Posted on Dec 7, 2020 5:39 PM

Either macOS 10.13+ was previously installed on this Mac which used the APFS file system which Mountain Lion does not understand or you have a bad hard drive. If you are downgrading the OS, then you will need to launch Disk Utility and repartition and reformat the whole physical drive using these instructions:

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

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Question marked as Best reply

Dec 7, 2020 5:39 PM in response to elee399

Either macOS 10.13+ was previously installed on this Mac which used the APFS file system which Mountain Lion does not understand or you have a bad hard drive. If you are downgrading the OS, then you will need to launch Disk Utility and repartition and reformat the whole physical drive using these instructions:

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

can't see my hard drive when trying to reinstall mountain lion

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