Internet restore Lion onto Mac Mini hanging

[Char2802]

Hi all, hoping someone can help.

I've sold my Mac mini, and following apples advice I've deleted everything and am running a clean install from the Internet restore option.

It's a mid 2011 Mac mini 4gb ram 500gb hdd. It came with Lion.

It was running El Capitan, but I googled and found I can't sell it with that OS as it is linked to my Apple ID.

So I deleted everything, went to disk utitility and deleted the indented partition under the hard drive, erased it, and then ran the install option for lion.

I left it a few hours (slow internet connection) and when I came back to it there was a message saying 'unable to download additional components' I clicked retry, and it was just hanging. The progress bar looked like it was at 99.999%. Checked Internet connection, even swapped to my iPhone's hotspot connection and nothing was happening. The error log said 'chunk validation failed retrying' about 1 million times.

I read in another thread that deleting the hard drive, rather than just the partition can help (which I've now done) - but before I fret for another 3 hours that I've thrown £200 down the drain can anyone confirm this will work or suggest and alternative?

It's happily chugging away at the moment with 2 hours 26 minutes to go.

TIA

Charlotte

 

[harryb2448]

G'day and welcome to the forums.

Recovery is a very slow process and take hours so I suggest you set it up and let run overnight. You can sell it with El Capitan by formatting the drive, installing El Capitan, and when it starts the setup hit 'Command Q'. When the new owner boots, they can do the setting up as they wish, but advise he/she they will require an Apple ID.

 

[Char2802]

Hi Harry thanks for your reply.

I will let this sit overnight now, I'm just hoping it doesn't hang again at the end. If it does I will try to post the error codes from the log to see if anyone can help.

It's still ticking away at the moment.

What makes me worry is the progress bar was right at the end when it threw the error up.

Not sure how to reinstall El Capitan now, I tried creating a backup earlier but it broke my hard drive (it was old, but it died a death halfway through and I don't have any other spares!)

I'll cross my fingers, and I have booked a genuis appointment just incase, however I've not got AppleCare so i don't know what that's going to cost me / if it's worth it.

 

[Char2802]

The errors have started already. ?

12 Jun 19 14:51:09 Localhost Install Mac OS X Lion [5482]: Download token has timed out attempting reauthorisation
13 Jun 19 14:51:10 Localhost Install Mac OS X Lion [5482]: Chunk validation failed retrying...

 

[Char2802]

Oh my lord - I heard the bong even though it had said about 50 minutes left when I last checked, it's now installing!!!

So if anyone comes up against this, it's either your internet, or you need to erase the whole drive, not just the partition.

Thanks be to the God of apple, and to google. Now for wine. It's been a long few hours.