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Mid-2012 15" Retina blank screen when booting from USB

I am trying to create a Yosemite bootable USB for a mid-2012 15" MacBook Pro Retina but whenever I try to boot from it the screen just stays black but the backlight is on. The machine still has a working version of Yosemite on it and recovery mode boots just fine and I can select the USB as a startup disk but upon restart it's just a backlit blank screen. Resetting the PRAM does not help.


The USB itself was created by downloading the Yosemite installer onto a mac mini running 10.6.8 and I carefully (and repeatedly) have followed the instructions using disk utility (GUID partition, etc...). When I try to boot from the USB I can see the USB's led flashes for 1-2 seconds but then stops suggesting it's not reading/loading it.


Any help would be much appreciated.

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Yosemite (10.10.4)

Posted on Jul 27, 2015 4:27 PM

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Posted on Jul 28, 2015 2:27 AM

Ok after a lot of (semi-frustrating) troubleshooting I found out the problem was because I was using a USB 3.0 stick.


I tried again using a USB 2.0 stick and it worked like a charm.


Solved.

1 reply

Mid-2012 15" Retina blank screen when booting from USB

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