can I upgrade directly from OSX 10.7.5 to Sierra?

Why don't you start at the beginning and tell us all, especially the 'lost everything' bit

I'm not very techie so please bare with me chaps.

First up I went to the App Store and hit the update button. After 2-3 hours the process finished and failed and I was left with a grey screen. From that I ended up on 'Mac OS X Utilities' and the four options that come with it. I ignored the Time Machine option has I hadn't backed up my files (at least I don't think I did/have) and duly clicked on 'Reinstall Mac OS X'. After following the instructions and waiting umpteen hours for the process to finish it ultimately ended in failure. I've repeated that process several times over the last few days and it's failed everytime. Because of these failures and in desperation I opened 'Disc Utility' and hit every button available, 'verify', 'disc repair' etc, in the hope it would fix things, alas, it didn't. I've since gone back to and repeated the 'Reinstall Mac OS X' process dozens of times without success.

Failing is bad enough but having to wait several hours for the download to finish before it does is soul destroying.

I too am trying to upgrade from 10.7.5 ( OSX Lion to Sierra ) . My attemtps to upgrade have also failed . I was previously on El Capitain when my disk drive failed.

I put in a brand new drive ( with the machine connected on a wired connection to the internet ) , pressed 'cmd-R' keys with the power button. The machine picks up the new drive with nothing on it, goes straight to Apple gets the utilities , you can then download OSX. Unfortunately you get OXS 10.7.5 ( OSX Lion ), not Sierra or even El Capitain, but at least you get your machine back ( if not your data ) .

Subsequent attempts to upgrade from Lion to Sierra ( or anything else ) have failed ( machine 'failed to download...' or similar message ) leaving the machine in a state of limbo. I am left with having to repeat the exercise with CMD-R to get OSX Lion back on .

When this happened , I also had to take the new drive out, put it on a USB connection to a windows machine, use the CLEAN command within the DISKPART utility to clean the new disk drive ( which had the failed attempt to upgrade to Sierra ) .

I am left with a working machine that does OSX lion ( 10.7.5 ) but no answer as to an upgrade. I 'd love an answer to this.

I don't know why your upgrades fail, but when you buy a bare hard drive, they are not formatted in any way. You must format them before you can used them. You could have done that in Recovery using Disk Utility, but as you found Diskpart did it too.

Some things that result in failed downloads are incorrect system clock or bad RAM.

You can also try restarting your modem and router.

Your MacBook is too old for Sierra, install El Capitan

Where do I get El Capitan? It's no longer on the App Store.

The processor I have is a intel core 2 duo 2.4 GHz 64 bit processor. I did add extra Ram which now adds up to 4 gbs of ram and a 1 TB hard drive. What is an EFI processor?

Thankyou for such a prompt reply. I tried both suggestions. No go. Can't imagine what's wrong.

It doesn't work. I have 10.7.5 on 13" Early 2011 macbook. And it says it requires 10.8 or later.

Think I’ve sorted it now. Managed to update to El Capitan via my purchases in the App Store and now High Sierra is currently installing. Thanks!

Vic tell me how you got it via App Store

Photos was introduced in Yosemite 10.10.3.

why cant not to upgrade to siera i have lion