I purchased a Seagate Backup Plus Slim back up 1 TB for windows and Mac. I have a Macbook Pro late 2011 10.8.5. I plugged it in and went to time machine to begin the backup and it indicated that the disk was not usable because it needed to be formated? How do I do this?
MacBook Pro, iOS 9
Lion is not on your computer any more. All 350,000+ files were written over when you installed Mountain Lion over Lion.
A Macintosh with a Blank drive just sits there, it cannot do anything.
I Tried the OS X reinstall by hitting control r. It began the process and said it would take about four hours. Then the message appeared ,OS X could not be installed on your computer because the disk hd is damaged and can't be repaired. Click restart to restart your computer and try installing again.
Then I tried utility button and reinstalling from time machine back up and the same error message occurred. eegads what now. I don't have an external copy of OS X
Mac OS X error message should generally be taken at face value.
If it says your disk (it is referring to Macintosh HD) is damaged, you should believe it.
Can it be repaired? Will I need to purchase a new internal hard drive or will that work?
If it says your disk (it is referring to Macintosh HD) is damaged, you should believe it. If you have already erased it once, it probably needs to be replaced.
My recommendation is to buy a new drive to replace the old, but hold off on doing the "surgery" for a little while. Place it in an external enclosure, and install a new Mac OS X on it and boot from it in the external enclosure. Then your Mac gets working again, and you can get settled with the new drive.
Only when you are satisfied that it is working well, do the "surgery" to put it inside your Mac. Any problems that develop from the surgery can be dealt with directly, instead of having the unsolvable "it doesn't work" as your symptom.
I Need a bit of clarification. FFirst I have never erased the original drive unless trying to reinstall six is considered an erase. Please clarify.
SO if I cannot erase I will purchase a new internal hd but keep it in an enclisuure. The enclosure is plugged into the computer. Is the original hd still in the computer? To what purpose? To get the osx command option r to install on the new hd? Then once the OS X is on the new hd remove it from the enclosure and put in the Mac? Then back up with time machine external hd to restore data? Why is surgery necessary at all - the old hd will just get tossed. could you please say step by step if this is incorrect?
I Meant OS X not six
I think this is what you said is your current state:
Using Recovery is telling you your Macintosh HD is damaged.
You have not erased the drive Macintosh HD.
In that case, hold down the Shift key as you Restart. This does a five-minute pass of Disk First Aid, which may repair the damage.
Then open Mac App Store, NOT Recovery, and download the version of Mac OS X you want directly. If you like have DiskMaker X and a 8GB or larger thumb drive available, you can make a USB-stick Installer when the download completes, but before the Re-Install is finished.
Is it possible to get diskmaker with my computer doing what it's doing? I have the 8 gb stick
time machine back up
