2011 MBA had no issues, but I decided to install the OS fresh.
The Lion install doesn't work, hardware test gives up. Snow Leopard was too old old and Catalina is too new.
Not sure how to proceed, see my steps below:
MacOS Lion internet recovery:
I tried booting into the recovery partition of Lion. It works, but after accepting the license agreement, the installation downloads components from the wifi. It takes about 5 minutes, appears to successfully complete, and then errors out.
“An error occurred while preparing this installation. Please try running this application again.”
I’ve tried running it a few times, and it doesn’t work.
I ran disk utility and formatted the main partition just in case and tried again, still doesn’t work.
Apple Hardware Test:
I charged up the machine fully and ran an Apple Hardware Test/diagnostic test at boot.
It seems to freeze around the minute mark.
Boot from USB or CD:
The Lion install doesn't work, hardware test gives up. Snow Leopard was too old old and Catalina is too new.
Not sure how to proceed, see my steps below:
MacOS Lion internet recovery:
I tried booting into the recovery partition of Lion. It works, but after accepting the license agreement, the installation downloads components from the wifi. It takes about 5 minutes, appears to successfully complete, and then errors out.
“An error occurred while preparing this installation. Please try running this application again.”
I’ve tried running it a few times, and it doesn’t work.
I ran disk utility and formatted the main partition just in case and tried again, still doesn’t work.
Apple Hardware Test:
I charged up the machine fully and ran an Apple Hardware Test/diagnostic test at boot.
It seems to freeze around the minute mark.
Boot from USB or CD:
- I have a Superdrive, so I tried booting an old Snow Leopard CD I had. It seems the hardware is incompatible.
- I downloaded Catalina and made a bootable USB (because older versions are no longer signed by Apple, I had to do Catalina)
- I try booting from USB but clicking on Catalina gives me an [x] in the middle of the screen, because Catalina is too new and doesn’t support the MBA 2011.
