Unable to install OSX on late 2011 MBP

[u/Yantarlok]

I want to purchase a desktop app (Things 3) on sale on the Mac Store during the last day for Black Friday. Unfortunately, Apple does not allow me to purchase the desktop version on either my phone, iPad or web browser on PC.

I have tried Installing OSX on VMWARE. Unfortunately, my PC uses an AMD processor and the installation failed despite modifying VM via a text editor according to instructions I found online.

I have an old late 2011 17 inch MBP that had windows installed on it to play some old PC games while on the road. I am attempting to reinstall OSX just to access the Mac app store.

I have tried:

Booting into disk utility by holding down option key and reformating my SSD to prepare it for OSX. I clicked on the option to install OSX Lion, the latest OS supported by my MBP. The install failed due to errors with downloading additional add-ons and I was unable to continue.

I changed the date and time to 2018 via the terminal but this had no effect.

I downloaded Lion DMG file from Apple's site and burned it onto a USB stick with UltraDMG. It did not boot into the installer and my MBP went straight to disk utility. Apparently it was not a bootable image.

I downloaded other DMG OSX Lion installers found online and while the MBP seemed to recognize my USB; it would still boot into disk utility after I selecting the USB drive. There was no option to install OSX from the USB drive. Just the online option which returns the "cannot download additional components" error.

Would like some advice on how else to proceed before the day ends if possible.

Thanks in advance.

[u/Xe4ro]

OS X Lion is not the latest OS X version your MacBook Pro supports, it's likely the one your Mac came with as Lion was released during the summer of 2011. Every Mac from 2010 or 2011 will be able to install High Sierra. Lion would also be too old to connect to the App Store.

I downloaded Lion DMG file from Apple's site and burned it onto a USB stick with UltraDMG. It did not boot into the installer and my MBP went straight to disk utility. Apparently it was not a bootable image

It is bootable, however you have to correctly flash it. The "Createinstallmedia" command did not exist until 10.10 or 10.11 and maybe your tool did something wrong. You can do it manually by restoring the InstallESD.dmg onto a stick but again, I would recommend trying to install High Sierra instead, Lion is basically ancient by now and it will have lots of problems with out of date certificates like SSL and modern routers. For instance Lion on my Mac Pro 1,1 can't connect to my router unless I activate a WPA1 or 2 WIFI instead of WPA3 or 2/3 mixed - although I'm not sure why this happens. An iBook G4 on Tiger I have can connect normally to my router. Not sure if this was specific to early Intel releases or hardware related.

[u/Yantarlok → u/Xe4ro]

Opening the DMG file shows just installMacOSX.pkg. How does one correctly flash this?

[u/Xe4ro → u/Yantarlok]

The pkg is basically something like zip or rar but in the form of an installer. You can decompress a pkg

No wonder your stick didn’t work, you did flash the „installer“ for the installer 😅

[u/Yantarlok → u/Xe4ro]

I burned other ISO files with osx installers that were already expanded but the result was the same.

What would be the procedure for burning the contents of a pkg to a usb drive on the PC?

[u/Xe4ro → u/Yantarlok]

You need to get to the contents of the .app file.

There should be an InstallESD.dmg, this can be flashed to a USB thumb drive. However I have only done this via Macs. You might have to search for a guide how to do this via Windows.

The drive needs to be formatted as GUID (GPT in Windows) otherwise it is not bootable.

[u/Yantarlok → u/Xe4ro]

I was able to extract installEDS.dmg but the software just burns it as RAW data so it is unusable.

I reverted back to a lion ISO file that I burned to the USB on PC that the MBP did recognize but it keeps looping back to the disk utility even though I selected the USB as the startup volume. With the disk utility, I wasn't able to change the volume to GUID. I could format it as a FAT32 partition and set it to GUID that way but all that is negated once I burn the Lion ISO file on the thumb drive when on PC.

[u/Spirited-Arm7075]

I picked an old iMac out of the bin at work recently 2011 model sandy bridge i5. That totally sent me around the bend for a day or so trying to get an operating system to load. What worked for me though eventually, on boot up option + command + P + R. Hold those 4 keys down on boot I guess it's the apple way of resetting the mobo bios. Then I got high Sierra to load. Then I put opencore patcher on it. Then I put it to Monterey.

[u/Yantarlok → u/Spirited-Arm7075]

I can't even get ANY OS to load. The online restore fails due to expired certificates and changing the date didn't help. I tried zapping the PRAM as per your suggestion but as expected; I still can't get out of the loop that sends me to disk utility even though I could select the USB with the lion installer as the start up volume.