MacBook Air Not letting me Reinstall OS X Disc

[muaaman]

Hello,

I have a 2012 model for the Macbook Air that suddenly crashed on me as I was working. It now appears with the question mark folder icon blinking when I open it.

I held down "Option" and it started to do an internet recovery. Afterwards, it gave me an option to Reinstall Mac OS X. When I get to the step of Select the disk where you want to install Mac OS X", it is blank.

What should I do?

 

[ylrd]

Choices:

• If you have another Mac, download your Lion/Mountain Lion installer from there (using the App Store of course) and build a bootable USB stick using Lion DiskMaker (despite its name, it works with Mountain Lion too)
• Make an appointment in your nearest Apple Store so they'll let you download your Lion/Mountain Lion installer from one of their Macs and you can build your bootable USB stick

 

[chrfr]

Hello,

I have a 2012 model for the Macbook Air that suddenly crashed on me as I was working. It now appears with the question mark folder icon blinking when I open it.

I held down "Option" and it started to do an internet recovery. Afterwards, it gave me an option to Reinstall Mac OS X. When I get to the step of Select the disk where you want to install Mac OS X", it is blank.

What should I do?

You can skip the steps in the above post for now. Start up internet recovery and then open Disk Utility instead of trying to reinstall to see if you can find the internal disk there. If it appears, with your disk listed, try to repair it. (not repair permissions, but click on the "Repair disk" button.)
If it's not listed the internal disk has failed and you'll need to get it replaced.

 

[rabidz7]

Have you tried rebooting onto an OS X USB. If a new install won't work it sounds like a bad SSD, but a bad SSD is very rare, it is most likely the controller. A new SSD would help for sure, if the install fails.

 

[muaaman]

If I did not make any backups and "Erase" and "Recovery" is not letting me select anything from the menu, what are my options w.r.t recovering my data?

 

[Weaselboy]

If I did not make any backups and "Erase" and "Recovery" is not letting me select anything from the menu, what are my options w.r.t recovering my data?

You can try something like Disk Warrior, but if you get into Internet Recovery and from there Disk Util cannot even see the disk, your outlook is fairly grim.

 

[ZBoater]

Hello,

I have a 2012 model for the Macbook Air that suddenly crashed on me as I was working. It now appears with the question mark folder icon blinking when I open it.

I held down "Option" and it started to do an internet recovery. Afterwards, it gave me an option to Reinstall Mac OS X. When I get to the step of Select the disk where you want to install Mac OS X", it is blank.

What should I do?

When you get to the recovery menu, instead of choosing reinstall OS, choose the disk utility. It looks like that drive may be hosed. A repartition/reformat may be necessary. Try the verify/repair disk options and see if that works.