Macbook Pro (2011) won't start. Having difficulty reinstalling macOS

Question

Macbook Pro (2011) won't start. Having difficulty reinstalling macOS

What I've been doing:

Turning on laptop
Holding down command + R until I'm in recovery mode
Run Disk Utility
Erase (reformat) MacintoshHD (like I've been told to do by apple support)
Quit Disk utility
Run macOS reinstaller
ERRORs: "localhost Instsall Mac OS X Lion[1470]: Chunk validation failed, retrys exhausted."
Pop-up: "Can't download the additional components needed to install Mac OS X"

Additional problems: I can see both my MacintoshHD and my usb-bootdrive on Disk Utility, but when asked to choose a Startup Disk, I'm not given any options...

I'm a total novice when it comes to this kind of thing and would very much appreciate some assistance... I really hope someone sees this...

Earlier Mac models

Posted on Mar 26, 2024 5:40 PM

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Answer 1

Mar 26, 2024 8:15 PM in response to justinschoi93

More than likely the laptop has a hardware issue of some sort if you had issues powering on the laptop prior to erasing it. My first guess would be a bad hard drive. You can try running the Apple Diagnostics to see if any hardware issues are detected, but they don't usually detect too many failures, however, it doesn't hurt to try.

If the Apple Diagnostics do not detect a hardware issue, then I would still recommend checking the health of the hard drive. One method is to create & use a bootable Knoppix Linux USB stick. Another option would be to try installing macOS onto an external USB3 drive to see if you have any better luck than attempting to install to the internal drive. If you can install to the external drive, then it probably means the internal drive has a problem.

What is the exact model of your laptop? You can get this information by entering the system serial number on the check coverage page here:

Check Your Service and Support Coverage - Apple Support

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Macbook Pro (2011) won't start. Having difficulty reinstalling macOS

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