Can’t Install Any Mac OS on Core 2 Duo Macbook

install

My old hard drive died and so I bought a new SSD, I put it in my macbook and plugged in the USB hard drive with the installation media, but no matter what it just won't boot into the installer: I see the bootable disk icon after pressing power + option ⏻ + ⌥, but as soon as I press the ↑ icon I get a prohibited ? icon and nothing more.

I have tried with macOS High Sierra, Yosemite and Mavericks images but they all do the same.

I tried everything:

  • TransMac
  • dd'ing the images into the USB hard drive (after converting the .dmgs into .isos with dmg2img (linux)
  • Creating an HFS+ filesystem and dumping the contents of the dmgs there

I have to note that I tried using the createinstallmedia command present in the installer's Resources directory (before my disk died) but I couldn't run it because this mac has a 32 bit OS and the file (according to the file command) is for a x86_64 arch.

I also tried with Mac OS X Snow Leopard (which is just one minor version above the one I had installed on the original drive, 10.5 Leopard) by dd'ing the boot disk into my USB drive and it does boot, but after 1 minute or so the apple symbol apple symbol gets replaced with a prohibited symbol ? and does nothing, even the disk activity LED stops blinking. If I dump the contents on an HFS+ partition it boots up to the language selection part, but a few seconds after selecting the language during the "Preparing installation" progress bar window,the window closes and a notification window pops up that says "The disk could not be read correctly, please clean it and try again" or something like that, and I can't do anything.

Apparently my Macbook is supported by High Sierra (according to Apple) and I do have the minimum 2 GB required (albeit DDR2 667 MHz), but I shouldn't have a problem I guess.

Best Answer

You don't specify the exact model of Core 2 Duo MacBook you're using, so the first thing to try is see if you can actually boot into macOS Recovery over the Internet, as some models were able to have their firmware updated to do just that.

First you need to be somewhere where you will be able to access the internet - however this works best with Wi-Fi networks using WEP and WPA security

Follow these steps:

  1. Ensure your MacBook is fully powered off
  2. Hold down the CommandOptionR keys and press the Power button
  3. Keep holding down the keys until you see a spinning globe with the message Starting Internet Recovery
  4. Soon you’ll see a progress bar - be patient as this may take a while
  5. Eventually the Utilities screen will appear
  6. Choose the Reinstall option
  7. Follow the prompts

If your MacBook is not compatible with Internet Recovery let me know and we’ll go to plan B.

Related Question