Installing Mountain Lion on MacBook Pro 2010

[alfarom]

I don't have much experience with Mac's but I've replaced a failed sata drive with a 240gb SSD in a 2010 MacBook Pro and am trying to reinstall Mountain Lion from the internet. It all seems to be going ok but the time remaining seems to be around 5 hours to completion. It has stabilised at around 5 hours but it's slow going.
Most advice I've found online suggests upto an hour should be the maximum time needed..
I've got a decent internet speed here so it's not that.
I've tried direct ethernet connection and wireless and it's the same in both.
The Mac was working ok before the hard drive failed.

Any ideas as to why this is taking so long?

 

[alfarom]

An hour later and now it's saying 5hr 20 minutes although the progress bar has moved about 20% now.

 

[MacInWin]

If the progress bar is moving, it's installing. Just be patient. Could be issues on the server side, or anywhere in the network between you and Apple.

 

[pm-r]

Any ideas as to why this is taking so long?

I have no idea what your actual situation is, but i have never had such an install take longer than about an hour.

Do you not have a bootable clone backup you could use and then just clone it back???

Are you sure you've formatted it correctly???





- Patrick
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[alfarom]

Seems MacInWin was right. The installation took about 3 hours in the end. The progress bar said there was around 3 hours still to go when it suddenly got its boots on and completed in a few minutes..

Regarding pm-r's suggestion, I was doing this for a friend. There was no backup (how often do I see that?) of any sort and even though I could recover the user data using some specialist DR software the old hard drive was of no use.

Anyway, all up and running again and much faster with a SSD installed. Thanks for the help.

How do I close a question/select best answer on these forums?

 

[pm-r]

Anyway, all up and running again and much faster with a SSD installed. Thanks for the help.

Glad to hear the installation was finally successful and everything is now working well.

I wonder if the owners will start making and maintaining a backup now???





- Patrick
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[alfarom]

What do you think?? I always tell people to but they rarely listen.. It's a friend so I'll keep a copy on my backup for them. It's only about 20gb of data.

 

[alfarom]

As a footnote to the time it took to reinstall the OS over the internet, I've just reinstalled High Sierra on another MacBook Pro and it only took 20 minutes. Obviously various day to day..