Thanks for your reply on this. You are correct, I was very tired when I wrote this. The other error was "This copy of the Install OS X Mountain Lion application can't be verified. It may have been corrupted or tampered with during downloading"
Then it says to download it again from the app store. Which I have done many times. When I had Lion running on the Macbook Pro during this rebuld process with a clean install and I had had several of these messages and downloaded several times putting the old download of ML in the trash. Then I thought I should empty the trash so there is no copy on the drive. All but one emptied saying it can not delete because it is in use.
I shut down the computer to reopen and try to delete, and it would no longer start up in Lion. Would not even show the white screen with the apple. Started on the usb and it showed drive problems, so I erased the drive again and tested ok. But to be safe I put a new SSD drive in and formated it OS X Journaled.
At this point there was no operating system to use app store so tried again with the SD card with the boot drive and OS X ML Install on.
Install still fails with: "Can't download the additional components needed to install Mac OS X"
I formated the drive OS Extended Journaled. Which is as I understand the way to format for an OS X install. One partition on the interal drive, other than the recovery partition that I think happens on OS X install or is it part of OS Extended Journaled?
I have no backups for this computer. It is my wifes and it seems that some kind of virus corrupted her drive, then after I had it working again on Lion it had been quiting Safari unexpectedly. It seemed stable... then when timemachine was doing a new back up it crashed and from that point it also said the time machine disk was in need of repair, and is not repairable. I will looking deeper into the possiblity of data recovery from this drive later as I have at least her most important files on the server.
I just want to get a clean install on a newly formatted drive that's it. 🙂
I may have the Snow Leopard disks, I am not sure in my last move if I kept them and can check a box or two to see. So I may try this depending on if the disks can be found.
I was having similar problems installing Lion and thought it was my drive. Althogh when I bought the SSD I also picked up a drive dock. Then I installed Lion onto the 7200 rpm 750G Seagate Momentus that was having some trouble, although it is only a few months old. I was able to install from a new Lion download on my iMac to this drive. This is how I was able to get the Macbook Pro to run. Since it seemed to be going well, I thought to install ML directly from the app download onto the MBP. That is when all the ML install trouble started. 😟
So I can probably get the Lion to install this way again to a drive for the MBP. I was wondering since I have the download for ML on the iMac (not yet installed, and not sure if I want on my main iMac) perhaps it will work to install ML to the SSD drive in the dock, then put it into the MBP. What I don't know is what that may do to my settings or Lion operating system on the iMac that is doing the install?