Hi all
After spending several days searching the web unsuccessfully, It's time I ask for help on this one.
Several months ago I purchased a Samsung 830 128GB SSD for my Macbook Pro 15 mid-2009. After a while of running OSX Lion successfully for around 6 months, due to the small capacity of the SSD, and wanting to run games that sadly weren't available for Mac, I made the mistake of installing Windows 7 on it, without boot camp, so there's no recovery mode or Mac OS anywhere on the SSD. Sadly during that time, the original hard drive that I removed was reused in another Windows system, so that is no longer available.
Now I would like to sell my MB, and I am trying to reload Mountain Lion on it again. After trying many methods, I am unable to get it to work. I have made a bootable USB stick, using various brands and sizes of sticks, Kingston, Duracell and Transcend sticks in sizes of 8GB and 16GB, and also with an external hard drive (Hitachi/160GB in a generic USB caddy). I have tried restoring the InstallESD.dmg to the sticks using Disk Utility, and also with Lion DiskMaker. when trying to boot from these sticks, it tried to load for a couple of minutes then I get the grey "error" symbol on the screen and it will not go any further, no matter how long it is left. All drives that I am trying to boot from are formatted as MacOS Journaled, with GUID partition table.
I have tried resetting the NVRAM, plugging the sticks in different USB ports, unplugging and replugging, everything I can think of. The only Mac machine that I have got to make these on a VMWare image on a Windows host which I downloaded just for this purpose, I don't have any other Apple machines to clone a drive from/to so I can't do it that way either. The InstallESD.dmg that I am using is from the App Store when I originally purchased it, and I have also tried copies from friends and other sources online, all seem to have the same issue and show the error symbol after a while.
I have tried swapping the SSD for a normal hard drive (500GB Western Digital), both tested and don't have any issues, I have tried swapping ram (8GB Crucial) and I'm still no where nearer to getting OSX reinstalled.
The only method I can think of to try is burning it to a dual layer DVD but I don't have any of those at the moment. Can anyone else think of any other ways? Is there a verbose option when booting from a USB install disk to see what it's getting stuck on? I have tried Cmd-v but it doesn't appear to work for USB booting.
Any help appreciated.
After spending several days searching the web unsuccessfully, It's time I ask for help on this one.
Several months ago I purchased a Samsung 830 128GB SSD for my Macbook Pro 15 mid-2009. After a while of running OSX Lion successfully for around 6 months, due to the small capacity of the SSD, and wanting to run games that sadly weren't available for Mac, I made the mistake of installing Windows 7 on it, without boot camp, so there's no recovery mode or Mac OS anywhere on the SSD. Sadly during that time, the original hard drive that I removed was reused in another Windows system, so that is no longer available.
Now I would like to sell my MB, and I am trying to reload Mountain Lion on it again. After trying many methods, I am unable to get it to work. I have made a bootable USB stick, using various brands and sizes of sticks, Kingston, Duracell and Transcend sticks in sizes of 8GB and 16GB, and also with an external hard drive (Hitachi/160GB in a generic USB caddy). I have tried restoring the InstallESD.dmg to the sticks using Disk Utility, and also with Lion DiskMaker. when trying to boot from these sticks, it tried to load for a couple of minutes then I get the grey "error" symbol on the screen and it will not go any further, no matter how long it is left. All drives that I am trying to boot from are formatted as MacOS Journaled, with GUID partition table.
I have tried resetting the NVRAM, plugging the sticks in different USB ports, unplugging and replugging, everything I can think of. The only Mac machine that I have got to make these on a VMWare image on a Windows host which I downloaded just for this purpose, I don't have any other Apple machines to clone a drive from/to so I can't do it that way either. The InstallESD.dmg that I am using is from the App Store when I originally purchased it, and I have also tried copies from friends and other sources online, all seem to have the same issue and show the error symbol after a while.
I have tried swapping the SSD for a normal hard drive (500GB Western Digital), both tested and don't have any issues, I have tried swapping ram (8GB Crucial) and I'm still no where nearer to getting OSX reinstalled.
The only method I can think of to try is burning it to a dual layer DVD but I don't have any of those at the moment. Can anyone else think of any other ways? Is there a verbose option when booting from a USB install disk to see what it's getting stuck on? I have tried Cmd-v but it doesn't appear to work for USB booting.
Any help appreciated.
