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Has anyone managed to reinstall a 2011 MacBook Air

podiki

podiki

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 8, 2008
138
40
Lagovouni
I have bricked mine and I don't seem to be able to reinstall it. I went back to my Apple Premium Reseller and they didn't manage either. The recovery install failed to download the necessary files, the same problem I had at home...

So here I am with a bricked one day old MacBook Air.... Anybody got any idea how to get it running again?
 
I booted it. Tried to download the updates. Which went well, but they couldn't be processed. Tried it again, after rebooting. Well, I thought, let's have some of that Lion Recovery goodness and I went to the recovery thing with command-R . First I threw away my regular boot partition and made a fresh one and then I chose reinstall. It tried to download a DMG, but every time after about 20 minutes it fails stating that there are data validation issues. That's how I've done it.

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Oh sorry, I already started a thread. Exhaustion, I was up until 3am to try and fix it. It takes a long time when it starts downloading and fails after 30 minutes.
 
podiki said:
I have bricked mine and I don't seem to be able to reinstall it. I went back to my Apple Premium Reseller and they didn't manage either. The recovery install failed to download the necessary files, the same problem I had at home...

So here I am with a bricked one day old MacBook Air.... Anybody got any idea how to get it running again?
Click to expand...

Sounds like perhaps a hardware problem ... I would return it.
 
I have successfully wiped and reinstalled one (before returning it).

In my case the problem was that it didn't like my wifi router for some reason. I used another one (with no password configured) and it worked fine then.
 
This is why apple needs to include a thumbdrive of lion with every new air! Or at least make one that works (one for sale at apple store doesn't work) for purchase!
 
I had a similar problem recently, on a white macbook c2d. I was installing lion from a disk, It started downloading files then after 10 mins it failed. It turns out it was the hdd failing, chock full of bad sectors!
Might not be the same reason it is failing for you but thought I'd share anyway.
 
I have wiped and reinstalled mine about 4 times and installed and reinstalled windows about 5 times. You either got a bad unit or really have no clue how to use a computer and probably shouldn't be doing more than turning it on and using it and turning it off.
 
I cracked it!! With my Mac Pro I installed Lion on an external drive and I hooked that up to the Air. it didn't find wifi, but with a USB WIFI adapter, I could get it to work. I downloaded Lion from the App Store and installed it on the internal drive.
 
i've done Internet recovery about five times, no issues.

Except perhaps, that it takes ages :D.

note: It actually is a very great new thing. For obvious reasons.

As far as it not working.....dunno. Probably hardware, or maybe your wireless.
 
podiki said:
I cracked it!! With my Mac Pro I installed Lion on an external drive and I hooked that up to the Air. it didn't find wifi, but with a USB WIFI adapter, I could get it to work. I downloaded Lion from the App Store and installed it on the internal drive.
Click to expand...

Any time machine drive will work just fine for installation since it installs the recovery partition into it.
 
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