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Hello - Thank you for your time. So my 2010 MacBook Pro A1278 got wiped and I am currently trying to download OS on the laptop. I keep getting an error in recovery mode to download Lion (need additional components error), so I made a bootable drive on my other Mac with High Sierra. I was finally able to start my computer with the flash drive, but when I tried to download High Sierra on to my computer it did not give me the option to download it to my hard drive, it was grayed out.
Any ideas? I’m out of them. Thank you.
It sounds like your system requires Sierra (HFS+) Vs High Sierra (APFS) volume to install. So you’ll need to either download and setup a bootable Sierra OS installer or using Disk Utility wipe your drive down and setup with GUID - APFS Also make sure you delete all of the volumes on your drive. How to create a bootable macOS Sierra installer drive Apple messed up on the OS installer images certificates so your old image may not work! If you’ve got an old macOS install image, it will probably stop working today Thats when messed you up with the Lion install. Apple is no longer maintaining the older OS certificates so you are doomed trying to re-install Lion from the recovery partition. If you still have the Lion OS installer there is a way to install it by back dating your system so the certificate check passes. But I think its just wiser to get to Sierra as being the best OS for these older MacBook Pro’s which have SATA drives and APFS has issues with SATA (HDD or SSD) Here’s the image file for Sierra How to upgrade to macOS Sierra Jump to Step 4 for the direct link.
