Hello all. I am fairly new to the world of Mac's and not all that great with any computer really. I have a 2010 model Macbook Pro that I recently tried to update from Lion to Mountain Lion. My friend gave me a disk to do the update with. Well when I started to do the update all seemed well and good. But it never actually updated. It just kept getting to a certain point and starting all over again. Now I am locked up and all I get when I start the Mac up is a message screen to install or update the OS. I tried disc utilities and was willing to just start all over and erase and repartition. But that says can not unmount drive. I tried time machine there is no backup in there. I have also tried to go back to snow leopard disc and just start from scratch installing that OS. But same thing, it just gets to a point and starts over. I am having no luck with it at all. It will not do a complete install of any OS as far as I can tell. I need some help. Maybe I am just missing something really simple here. But please understand that I do not know a lot of the terms and what not and will need good details on any ideas anyone has to help me get it back up and running. Thank you for reading my thread.
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Novice Macbook Pro user computer locked up trying to update
- Thread starter Southpaw26
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Have you tried software Update, it is in your Menu Bar, click on the Apple Menu and there is a Software Update Sub Menu.
P.S. You can Login into your account, can you?
P.S. You can Login into your account, can you?
No I can not get into my account. I can even get to that point. Unless I am missing something really small here. When I start my machine it says OS X installer. And some times I can get into disc utilities / timemachine.
Seems to be the recovery partition which it starts from.
What do you see if you hold the Option(Alt) key when startup, you could insert your SL disk in the machine and then hold the C key or option key when startup, this way you should be able to start all over.
When holding down option I get the choice between Recovery and OS X installer. But I can get anywhere with either one of those. I even put in my snow leopard disc and held down C. But like Mountain lion it will not complete a install.
Then there "might" be a more serious problem, odd that all of them refuse to install after some time, there might be bad sectors on the HDD.
Do you have an external bootable backup?
Is there anyone close to you with a mac, you could for instance put another mac in Target Disk Mode and try to start from that one.
I have my old smaller HD that I can put in my external hard drive case. Could I make that work. How would I go about using that HD to fix this one? I really am a newbie... 
I have my old smaller HD that I can put in my external hard drive case. Could I make that work. How would I go about using that HD to fix this one? I really am a newbie...
First try what you said if it starts up from there, if that is the case come back to report.
I don't know what you mean. I know how to put the HD in the external case but I do not know how to do anything with it on the actual mac its self.
Put the HDD in the external case, connect it to the computer, hold Option key(Alt) when start up, if it is a bootable HDD it will show up, select the external HDD and hit the Return Key.
When it is working and you log in into OS X then Open Disk Utilities and try to repair the internal disk, if it says there where errors and can't repair the disk, go and erase/partition the disk(note: you loose everything on the disk) and then insert the Snow Leopard disk and restart, hold the C key or Option key again and select the DVD installer disk.
Before you restart you could also insert the DVD, a window opens and click on Installer, the System then automatically restarts into the DVD OS X Installer disk.
Ok I have the external up and running. I went to disk utilities and it says the internal hard disk appears to be ok... What now?
Depends on you, do you want to completely start over then do as I said in my last message, but as I said, you will loose everything.
At least your machine seems to be OK, that's good news.
Could I just be doing something wrong here? Could there be something simple I am missing why it wont start up on the internal HD?
Erm, probably not, you might consider posting some pictures here and show what it is doing, could shed some more light on the problem.