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Machintosh HD greyed out during Catalina installation

T

TimManzana

macrumors member
Original poster
May 9, 2020
53
15
Hey fellas I’m needing some help here, I was trying to help a friend do a fresh install on her mid 2012 MacBook Air I believe, I made a bootable Catalina installer, booted from flash drive, erased the machintosh HD from disk utility, used APFS format, closed disk utility, went back to the previous screen, selected “Install Mac OS Catalina” agreed terms and condition and on the next screen the machintosh HD is greyed out, no way to pick it so I’m stuck.
I’ve tried going back to disk utility and perform a repair under first aid, reformat and no dice.
internet recovery is not an option because she doesn’t have wifi. Any clues what could be happening?
 
I don't believe you can reinstall without an internet connection. Not going to be easy finding a place that's open which has free WiFi nowadays because of the pandemic restrictions. Maybe a friend who has WiFi will help out.
 
chscag said:
I don't believe you can reinstall without an internet connection. Not going to be easy finding a place that's open which has free WiFi nowadays because of the pandemic restrictions. Maybe a friend who has WiFi will help out.
Click to expand...
She was able to take it to work and use the wifi there, through internet recovery it suggested to reinstall mountain lion, but the installer couldn’t see the disk drive formatted in APFS so we te-formatted back to the old format and mountain lion installer could then see it to proceed with the installation.
To make it as easy as possible for her we just went ahead and continued with the installation and will try to upgrade to the newest OS through the software update option instead. I know I could’ve alternate to the latest version from within the internet recovery but that involved extra steps that I just couldn’t guide her from work, the main thing was to get the computer to a usable state first.
I’m still puzzled that the Catalina installer couldn’t see the disk once formatted to APFS, I will have to worry about that later i guess
 
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