Well, long story. I have a 2010 Macbook that still serves me faithfully and is still speedy enough for my needs with Ram upgrades and a fast SSD. I'm on it typing this right now.
However, at some point in the last few months something in OSX got corrupted and things started acting strange. "About my Mac" simply won't open. The Messages app opens but the icon is the standard "Application" icon in my dock and doesn't seem to update - just cosmetic, but weird nonetheless. Most problematic is my Photos app won't open at all - the icon bounces a few times and then simply stops. The "Option + Command" option to rebuild the index doesn't work whatsoever. There's other weird crap going on as well.
I'm not sure what's wrong, but all attempts to resolve things have gone nowhere.
So, my plan was to simply backup to Time Machine, reformat the machine, and then restore my data only (but not the core system) to hopefully get things working again.
But, that hit repeated roadblocks. I made a 10.13 USB install (same version it was running), booted from it, formatted the SSD, and started the install process. Everything appears to be going just fine until suddenly it dumps out at a "MacOS Could not be installed on your computer" and complains about needing to do a hardware diagnosis.
I reboot into diagnostic mode (Holding D during startup) and it passes all the tests saying "There are no issues" more or less. It passes all the tests.
But continuing to try to continue the install process resulted in the same error over and over again. There seemed to be no way to get it to continue.
I even tried installing an older version of OSX, going back to Leopard at one point to see if I could simply get OSX working again and follow the upgrade path via the App Store instead. Same result - Leopard installed perfectly fine, but going to High Sierra (the last version of OSX this machine will support) dumps out at the same error again during the upgrade/install.
Eventually I simply did a full restore from my Time Machine backup which got the machine up and running again (on 10.13), sure, but with the exact same issues it had before...so I'm no further ahead aside from at least having a functional machine again in the meantime.
Any suggestions on how to get around this, or an alternate way to get a fresh install on this machine?
However, at some point in the last few months something in OSX got corrupted and things started acting strange. "About my Mac" simply won't open. The Messages app opens but the icon is the standard "Application" icon in my dock and doesn't seem to update - just cosmetic, but weird nonetheless. Most problematic is my Photos app won't open at all - the icon bounces a few times and then simply stops. The "Option + Command" option to rebuild the index doesn't work whatsoever. There's other weird crap going on as well.
I'm not sure what's wrong, but all attempts to resolve things have gone nowhere.
So, my plan was to simply backup to Time Machine, reformat the machine, and then restore my data only (but not the core system) to hopefully get things working again.
But, that hit repeated roadblocks. I made a 10.13 USB install (same version it was running), booted from it, formatted the SSD, and started the install process. Everything appears to be going just fine until suddenly it dumps out at a "MacOS Could not be installed on your computer" and complains about needing to do a hardware diagnosis.
I reboot into diagnostic mode (Holding D during startup) and it passes all the tests saying "There are no issues" more or less. It passes all the tests.
But continuing to try to continue the install process resulted in the same error over and over again. There seemed to be no way to get it to continue.
I even tried installing an older version of OSX, going back to Leopard at one point to see if I could simply get OSX working again and follow the upgrade path via the App Store instead. Same result - Leopard installed perfectly fine, but going to High Sierra (the last version of OSX this machine will support) dumps out at the same error again during the upgrade/install.
Eventually I simply did a full restore from my Time Machine backup which got the machine up and running again (on 10.13), sure, but with the exact same issues it had before...so I'm no further ahead aside from at least having a functional machine again in the meantime.
Any suggestions on how to get around this, or an alternate way to get a fresh install on this machine?
