So back in 2011 I bought a new macbook pro, after a year and half it randomly stopped working. Whenever I turned it on, all it did was stay in the apple logo with the little circle spinning below. Then I tried cleaning the hard drive and doing a fresh install of the OS but it never worked. I took it to the apple store and they told me it was the ram. I ended up putting the mac away for some time and just took it out now. I installed new ram but cant install any OS on it. After booting recovery mode and cleaning the HD I installed OS X Lion from a dvd and from the internet recovery mode, both were unsuccessful. The installation seems to go well at the beginning with the timer going from 1hr down to 0s, but then it just restarts back to 1hr with the bar still fully blue. I thought maybe it takes forever so I decided to leave it overnight one day and the next morning it was still the same. I only have access to the recovery mode options and have verified and repair the HD countless times with no errors. I have spent the last 3 days trying to install an OS and installation always fails.
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Macbook Pro 2011 OS X installation
- Thread starter yofancy
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Do you have access to a usb external HDD? How about a USB to SATA cable (about $10)? I suggest you boot into recovery and install OSX on an external drive connected via USB. If that works, you know there is something wrong with the drive inside your MBP and you can open it up and put in the one you just installed on. Another thing to try is take it to an Apple store for a free genius bar appointment and let them boot it over the network using one of their network-bootable OS X images. If they get it to boot then at least you know you can get that far. Perhaps they will have further suggestions based on whether or not they can boot it over the network.