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El Capitan broke my Macbook, what are the chances of me saving this Macbook Pro?

My girlfriend has a 2011 Macbook Pro which had Yosemite on it. After installing El Capitan on my 2015 Macbook Air, I decided to update her Macbook Pro. Since I tried to update it, we're just in an endless loop of rebooting and the Macbook Pro says: "an error occurred while preparing the installation". I've searched the internet for many, many hours and found that the "fix" was to do one of the following things:


  1. Set the date in the terminal using something like: datentp -u time.apple.com
  2. Reset NVRAM/PRAM
  3. Reset SMC

I've done ALL of this and when I run "repair" in Disk Utility, it tells me it cannot repair. So today i'm going to boot up whilst holding 'T' and attach a thunderbolt cable from her Macbook Pro to my Macbook Air.

What are the chances of me being able to recover her data? And what are the chances of me being able to erase her HDD after i've transferred data and installing El Capitan?

P.S - On a side note: I am very, very disappointed with Apple for the El Capitan upgrade. It has made my girlfriend's MBP unusable - and it was fine prior to trying to upgrade. It is fully OEM, has no 3rd party RAM and has always been treated with care.

MacBook Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.5)

Posted on Oct 11, 2015 12:29 AM

5 replies

Aug 18, 2018 1:10 PM in response to Malcolm J. Rayfield

Thanks for the replies but unfortunately, none of this worked. I've purchased a new HDD and will try to boot up with COMMAND+T and use a thunderbolt cable to get her data onto my Mac.Then reinstall El Capitan on the new HDD. Will update this next week and let you know the results.

Oct 11, 2015 2:51 AM in response to Community User

A major update stresses the HD and infrequently a marginal HD will fail during the update.

Do you have a backup?

If not then ether boot the problem Mac in Target disk mode and connect to another Mac via FW or Thunderbolt and see if you can copy the date. You may need a disk recovery software

http://data-recovery-software-review.toptenreviews.com/mac-recovery-software/

You can download a demo of Data Rescue 4, and the demo will give you an idea of what it can recover. If it looks promising, you then can buy the software.

After getting the data yo maybe able to forate the HD and install EC but I would not trust the disk since it may fail with similar symptoms in the near future

Jun 5, 2016 6:39 PM in response to Community User

One portion of stuff that does NOT need to be saved is the over 350,000 files that make up Mac OS X. A fresh install replaces them EXACTLY -- Mac OS X does not modify itself, and all preferences are placed in .plist and similar preference files in your user directory.


User files are stored in directories under

/Users

... by folders corresponding to short-user-name.

El Capitan broke my Macbook, what are the chances of me saving this Macbook Pro?

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