Chosen Solution
I have this late 2011 MacBook Pro (15”) that has been sitting around for a year or two now because it was so slow. I erased it and reinstalled Mac OS and sent it off as trade in. They returned it to me and said it wont start. Since it started for me I had it returned to me and I figured maybe I’ll try to upgrade the RAM and salvage it. It starts for me but now after having it shipped back and forth, disk utility says the hard drive has failed beyond repair. So I thought maybe I can reinstall on an external drive to see if it even recognizes the RAM before I replace the hard drive. Starting in recovery mode it lets me choose “Reinstall Mac OS” (wanting to install Lion) and choose the external (reformatted) drive, but then it stops and says it is not able to download additional components for the installation. Would there be any sense in replacing the hard drive and trying again? Or installing OS X on an external drive from a different computer? Or is this all beyond repair?
You’ve got a few problems here ;-{ The first is the drive you have connected externally format may not be compatible with OS-X’s need. Go back into OS recovery and this time go the menu to select Disk Utility and reformat your external drive to GUID Journaled. But we still have a problem! Apple’s certificates on the older OS’s have not be updated! This is where the recovery partition or Internet recovery will fail. So you’ll need to fool the OS installer by back dating your system manually to the OS installer doesn’t know the true date! I would just go with a newer version that has the correct certificate I would go with Sierra as being the best for your system. Create an OS installer following this guide How to create a bootable macOS Sierra installer drive You’ll want this image How to upgrade to macOS Sierra jump down to Step 4 to get the link. The reason you want this file is the older ones have an expired certificate too! Here’s a bit more If you’ve got an old macOS install image, it will probably stop working today Hopefully you can get the external drive going so you can at least validate the system is OK. Getting an SSD for this system is not a bad thing! I would just go with a smaller one 256 or 500 GB and upgrade it to at least 8GB of RAM to make is usable.
