Need Help: Trying to reinstall Lion on my iMac with no luck...

[braeburn]

Hi Everyone,

So I bought a used, 5 months old, iMac a few days ago and it is working great but decided to do a fresh install of Lion.

I went ahead and followed the process, which can be found on many sites but used this one, http://macs.about.com/od/MountainLion/ss/How-To-Perform-A-Clean-Install-Of-Os-X-Mountain-Lion-On-A-Startup-Drive.htm, but to install Lion and not ML...

When I get to the point where I select "Reinstall Mac OS X" option, it goes through the process to verify and starts the download but fails and comes up with the "can't download the additional components to install mac os x" every time...It varies as to when this message comes up, had one fail with 20 minutes left...

I tried with and without the wifi on while a hard lan is connected but the same...

Not sure what would cause the download to fail...

Any ideas???

 

[braeburn]

Anyone???

I have a copy of Lion on dvd and tried holding the C button while the imac restarts to tell it to boot from the optical drive but no luck....

Any help is appreciated...

 

[HenryAZ]

Anyone???

I have a copy of Lion on dvd and tried holding the C button while the imac restarts to tell it to boot from the optical drive but no luck....

Any help is appreciated...

What do you have on the DVD, the whole app, called "Install Mac OS X Lion" ? Or did you extract the "InstallESD.dmg" and make a bootable disk?

If you still have the whole app somewhere, and a bootable cloned (external) hard drive, you can just copy the app to the external drive, boot from it, and run the install from there. Or, extract the ESD file and try making a bootable USB stick instead of a DVD. I didn't have good luck with the DVD process.

 

[braeburn]

Don't have the full app...

The dvd itself is the ESD file...Don't have a copy of the whole app to extract the esd to usb...

 

[braeburn]

Got my iMac to install a fresh Lion per your suggestion HenryAZ...

Followed this link....

Copied the ESD onto a USB and plugged it into the iMac and booted off of it...The Lion download took only about 15 minutes with no issue and continued thru the instructions on the iMac...