Hey folk's, I have attempted to reinstall OS X sierra on my Mac mini and I restored my Macintosh HD drive instead of erasing it & now it shows as locked when trying to install Sierra from recovery mode. Pretty dumb move but it's done now. Is there anything I can do. I have partitioned an old external hard drive so I could install sierra but once done how would I repartition to get the internal drive working again. I hope this makes some sort of sense. Any help or advise would be brilliant. Be gentle, it was pretty stupid I agree!
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Whoops is all I can say.
- Thread starter Jmacka23
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
A lot of this doesn't add up for me.
You restored from a Time Machine backup instead of Reinstall MacOS? If not, what do you mean by "restored?"
I'm not clear on why or how that HD is locked. What is the exact message you get when you try to Reinstall MacOS?
Or is the Macintosh HD partition grayed-out in Disk Utility? That would mean it's FileVault encrypted.
You restored from a Time Machine backup instead of Reinstall MacOS? If not, what do you mean by "restored?"
I'm not clear on why or how that HD is locked. What is the exact message you get when you try to Reinstall MacOS?
Or is the Macintosh HD partition grayed-out in Disk Utility? That would mean it's FileVault encrypted.
Thanks for the reply mate,
Macintosh HD doesn't show at all anymore. I have somehow changed it to the base os X instead of it being Macintosh HD it is Mac OS X base system. I restored the partition that was Macintosh HD to Mac OS X & now when i got to reinstall Sierra it shows Mac OS X base system instead of Macintosh HD. It won't allow me to partition the drive at all now
[doublepost=1489354269][/doublepost]
I think the entire 500 gig is being used for system restore instead of 320 gig for files etc
The macOS Base System is not your drive. It's simply a mounted image that your system uses for system recovery.
You can't do anything with it, except to know that it exists.
Be sure to restart at this point, even if you are already booted to your recovery system - it's a good first step!
So, try restarting to your recovery system (Restart, holding Command-R), then open Disk Utility, erase your hard drive (should be the item listed at the top of the list of drives, NOT the base system image)
You can name the hard drive partition whatever you like. When that finishes the Erase process, Quit Disk Utility, and continue on with Reinstall macOS.
You can't do anything with it, except to know that it exists.
Be sure to restart at this point, even if you are already booted to your recovery system - it's a good first step!
So, try restarting to your recovery system (Restart, holding Command-R), then open Disk Utility, erase your hard drive (should be the item listed at the top of the list of drives, NOT the base system image)
You can name the hard drive partition whatever you like. When that finishes the Erase process, Quit Disk Utility, and continue on with Reinstall macOS.
Oh and no it wasn't a time machine backup. When i hit restore on Macintosh HD, it gave the only option as Mac OS X base system. Shouldn't have done that obviously. I think i just need to split or rename that portion of the drive but am looking for someone who knows what they're doing before i stuff it up again