# Problems installing OS X



## Andrew4385 (Sep 21, 2016)

Hello everyone! I'm Andrew. I run my own computer repair business out of my basement and things have been going well... until I got my first Mac to repair.

Guy comes in saying his HDD is corrupted, that he can'd download the Internet recovery. I take a look, and yea his HDD is totally fried. I told him that I could replace the HDD and reinstall the OS for him, and he agreed.

So, now I have this Mac sitting on my desk and for 3 days, I have made absolutely no progress. I took another HDD I had, a Seagate 320 GB (there was a Seagate 1TB HDD in it before).
I formatted it to HFS+ using my windows PC (create part pri id=af in command prompt running as admin).
I downloaded TransMac and plugged in my thumb drive...
-Format disk for Mac
-Volume Name: Untitled 1
-Save image of disk
-Selected Mountain Lion 10.8.5.dmg

Ok, thumb drive ready, HDD ready. I plug the HDD in, plug in the thumb drive, hit power and upon the chime press Option (Alt for my keyboard).

A screen comes up showing a picture of a hard drive. underneath the image, it says Windows.

There is no thumb drive listed, its not detecting it at all.

Online recovery results in a 2003f error every time, which I looked up and it could be any number of things

Stipulations: I do not have another Mac to use at all, all I have is a Windows 10 PC as I don't use apple products (This situation is giving me further reason not to haha).

I scheduled an appt at my local apple store a few days ago and took it there today. They tried to feed me someBS about the HDD cords being 'pinched' so there was a communication error that was preventing them from installing the OS. They also told me that because it wasn't the original HDD that came with it, they wouldn't install the OS. Which is BS because if that were the case, they wouldn't have found out that they couldn't install the OS because of the pinched cords. So basically, I'm probably out of luck in that department. Also, I inspected the cords, and both the SATA cable and the power connector were perfectly fine. If there were a problem with either of the cords then the computer wouldn't be detecting the HDD, which it is.


The Point: How can I get this 2011 Mac to recognize my Thumb drive so that I can reinstall ML 10.8.5? Im also curious why the HDD says Windows underneath it or not.

Are there any steps that I'm missing? Not formatting the HDD or the thumb drive correctly? Is there even a way for me to accomplish what I am wanting to do?

Thanks for any help and sorry for the novel here. I uploaded a picture of what the Mac shows when its on the boot menu.


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## Andrew4385 (Sep 21, 2016)

Edit: Ran disk repair utility on the old HDD and repartitioned it after marking off the bad sectors, so now the original HDD is operational, though for how long is anybody's guess, but the Mac is doing the same thing with this one that its doing with the 320 GB HDD, it detects the HDD but it says Windows below the image and won't detect my thumb drive or DL from Internet Recovery.


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## fishscene (Apr 1, 2015)

I'm also calling BS on the pinched cords - but they're going to use every excuse possible to "let you off easy" due to their policy of "If money for hardware devices doesn't filter to Apple, the refuse to help". Hardware is Apples income.

I'm afraid you will need a working Mac.

I just installed a fresh-clean copy of Mac OS Sierra on my Wife's computer using this method and it worked flawlessly:

http://www.macworld.com/article/309...-a-bootable-macos-sierra-installer-drive.html

Basically, you format the USB drive for Mac (Any non-Mac partition/format will be detected as a "Windows" drive- even if it has Linux), and create a bootable USB drive (copying a dmg file to the drive won't work as there isn't any boot information on the USB drive). There are other, similar methods that work for older versions, such as Yosemite. But the one above is specifically for the latest and greatest.


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