Help I deleted my hard drive (Macbook Pro Mid-2012)

[corymacs]

Hi all,

I am trying to upgrade my Mid-2012 Macbook Pro so I started by erasing my hard drive.

I am a rookie so I messed up and didn't realize it would delete my OS also. I was on Mojave.
Now, when I do CMD+R at startup, it only offers for me to reinstall LION.

Does anyone have any advice?
I really would like to be on Mojave because it is much better..., right?

I'm planning on putting in a new battery, a Samsung 860 EVO SSD, and 2x8GB of Corsair RAM after that.

Does anyone have any good advice they can offer in this situation? Thanks

 

[krs]

Why don't you just install Lion and when that is done upgrade to Mojave.

I think that is the safest way

 

[corymacs]

Why don't you just install Lion and when that is done upgrade to Mojave.

I think that is the safest way

i read somewhere that this might not be possible but i very well could have been misled. do you really think this is best route? how would i go about downloading mojave? do i just google mojave OS download or something? i am a noob.
thanks for your reply.

 

[RadDave]

i gladly can, which one should i delete? I was not sure the best area to post this topic in. not trying to disturb. thanks.

Hi Cory..... - welcome to the forum! As already stated, one of the first 'rules of thumb' in forums is to not post the same message in multiple places - this is unfair to posters replying to one message and not seeing the other responders in the alternate post - the conversation is disrupted and the suggestions often confusing - hopefully one of our mods/admins will come along and simply combined your two threads and place in an appropriate forum - then there should be some useful responses - good luck. Dave

 

[corymacs]

Hi Cory..... - welcome to the forum! As already stated, one of the first 'rules of thumb' in forums is to not post the same message in multiple places - this is unfair to posters replying to one message and not seeing the other responders in the alternate post - the conversation is disrupted and the suggestions often confusing - hopefully one of our mods/admins will come along and simply combined your two threads and place in an appropriate forum - then there should be some useful responses - good luck. Dave

hi thanks for your reply. i apologize. did not mean to disrupt. is there any way for me as a user to combine them? thanks

 

[krs]

i read somewhere that this might not be possible but i very well could have been misled. do you really think this is best route? how would i go about downloading mojave? do i just google mojave OS download or something? i am a noob.
thanks for your reply.

Lion is what your Mac shipped with originally - so that is the OS Apple will offer automatically.

Once that is installed, you can check via he App store on your Mac (with Lion installed) which newer OSs are offered.
I assume you have an Appe ID

If the App store offers Catalina (one OS past Mojave), remember that Catalina won't support any 32-bit apps

But download and install Lion first and see what is offered via the App store.
s

 

[MacInWin]

No, but a Mod will come along sometime and fix it. I second the suggestion to install Lion, then upgrade from there to what you want. Get Lion on it first, we can sort out the Mojave installer later. Come back when Lion is there.

 

[corymacs]

No, but a Mod will come along sometime and fix it. I second the suggestion to install Lion, then upgrade from there to what you want. Get Lion on it first, we can sort out the Mojave installer later. Come back when Lion is there.

thank you

 

[corymacs]

hi guys so a little update:

after much difficulty, i now am seeing the option to install CATALINA. i have two options of where to install it... should i install it to BOOTCAMP disk or to Macintosh HD disk?

thank you very much

 

[MacInWin]

What Bootcamp? I thought you said you erased the hard drive? Bootcamp is used to install a dual boot Windows system in a separate partition. If you had Windows on the old drive and didn't remove it from your macOS system, you will have to restart by completely reformatting and erasing the drive to get that space back. The new system won't know about that bootcamp installation and won't be able to control it as it would if it had been the system that installed it.

How about we start over. What Mac do you have? What did it have on it before you erased it? What did you erase? What did you NOT erase?

 

[corymacs]

What Bootcamp? I thought you said you erased the hard drive? Bootcamp is used to install a dual boot Windows system in a separate partition. If you had Windows on the old drive and didn't remove it from your macOS system, you will have to restart by completely reformatting and erasing the drive to get that space back. The new system won't know about that bootcamp installation and won't be able to control it as it would if it had been the system that installed it.

How about we start over. What Mac do you have? What did it have on it before you erased it? What did you erase? What did you NOT erase?

yes i did erase my main hard drive. i didn't have windows OS on anything. did i accidentally say that..?

ok let's start over. thanks by the way for your reply. i have a mid-2012 macbook pro. i had mojave installed on it before i erased it (my personal data/documents is not a concern). i erased the hard drive, which erased my OS also of course. i didn't touch the other disks/drives at all.
i am currently in the process of hopefully successfully installing catalina. hoping this works!

 

[krs]

hi guys so a little update:

after much difficulty, i now am seeing the option to install CATALINA. i have two options of where to install it... should i install it to BOOTCAMP disk or to Macintosh HD disk?

thank you very much

I think it's confusing that you mentioned a "Bootcamp" disk.
Is that actually a completely different disk like a separate external drive or just a partition on the internal MacBookPro drive.

In any case, you want to install Catalina on the Macintosh HD drive.
But maybe before that, could you explain a bit better what that "Bootcamp" disk is.
Bootcamp is just an Apple application that allows one to install certain flavours of Windows on a Mac

 

[IWT]

Hi corrymacs - welcome to our family forum

I am a rookie

I am trying to upgrade my Mid-2012 Macbook Pro

I was on Mojave.

I really would like to be on Mojave because it is much better

Interesting juxtaposition of comments

Being on macOS Mojave, the only upward option is macOS Catalina. So you need to consider very carefully whether you are ready for Catalina (big changes as mentioned already - no 32 bit apps; Music in place of iTunes etc) OR whether on reflection Mojave is where you want to stay.

Your Cmd + R took you into Internet Recovery where the only option is to download the Operating System (OS) with which the Mac shipped ie Lion. From there to.... still to be decided.

And this option to go straight to Catalina - how? where did you get that info?

There's a lot to think about here; not least your concluding comment:

I'm planning on putting in a new battery, a Samsung 860 EVO SSD, and 2x8GB of Corsair RAM after that.

Not bad for a "rookie". More than I could do

Ian

 

[NSMacGuru]

Some helpful info from an Apple Support document on Recovery mode, and the options for OS restore...

Command (⌘)-R
Reinstall the latest macOS that was installed on your Mac (recommended).

Option-⌘-R
Upgrade to the latest macOS that is compatible with your Mac.

Shift-Option-⌘-R
Reinstall the macOS that came with your Mac, or the closest version still available.

 

[IWT]

Absolutely, NSMacGuru. Hence the need for the OP to consider what the ultimate aim is.

Ian

 

[corymacs]

I think it's confusing that you mentioned a "Bootcamp" disk.
Is that actually a completely different disk like a separate external drive or just a partition on the internal MacBookPro drive.

In any case, you want to install Catalina on the Macintosh HD drive.
But maybe before that, could you explain a bit better what that "Bootcamp" disk is.
Bootcamp is just an Apple application that allows one to install certain flavours of Windows on a Mac

thanks for the input. i bought this macbook from a friend and i did not realize he must have downloaded this "bootcamp" application and it confused me when i went to select my drive/disk. i downloaded it on my macontish HD drive now.

Hi corrymacs - welcome to our family forum


Interesting juxtaposition of comments

Being on macOS Mojave, the only upward option is macOS Catalina. So you need to consider very carefully whether you are ready for Catalina (big changes as mentioned already - no 32 bit apps; Music in place of iTunes etc) OR whether on reflection Mojave is where you want to stay.

Your Cmd + R took you into Internet Recovery where the only option is to download the Operating System (OS) with which the Mac shipped ie Lion. From there to.... still to be decided.

And this option to go straight to Catalina - how? where did you get that info?

There's a lot to think about here; not least your concluding comment:

Not bad for a "rookie". More than I could do

Ian

i could use your help in deciding if i should go with catalina or mojave. when i did CMD+opt+R at start up it led me to a download for catalina. i do a lot of adobe creative cloud applications currently and need a OS that will support that (ex, after effects, photoshop, illustrator, premiere pro).

what should i go with? would mojave be better? i am not concerned about the music in place of itunes change. but are creative cloud applications 32 bit..?

i'm just starting out. just trying to do what's best for my cpu and my needs. thinking about fixing my overheating problem too.

Some helpful info from an Apple Support document on Recovery mode, and the options for OS restore...

Command (⌘)-R
Reinstall the latest macOS that was installed on your Mac (recommended).

Option-⌘-R
Upgrade to the latest macOS that is compatible with your Mac.

Shift-Option-⌘-R
Reinstall the macOS that came with your Mac, or the closest version still available.

thanks for this helpful snippet of info!

 

[krs]

i could use your help in deciding if i should go with catalina or mojave. when i did CMD+opt+R at start up it led me to a download for catalina. i do a lot of adobe creative cloud applications currently and need a OS that will support that (ex, after effects, photoshop, illustrator, premiere pro).

what should i go with? would mojave be better? i am not concerned about the music in place of itunes change. but are creative cloud applications 32 bit..?

Apple will always try to move you to the latest OS which is Catalina, but in your case, being a "rookie" as you said, I would stick with Mojave at least for now. Some peope still have some issues with Catalina, for others it works just fine, but it is not a stable as Mojave.
You can always upgrade to Catalina later if needed, but I don't think there are any applications currently that actually require it.

However, Mojave may not be readily available through the normal downloads that Apple presents to you, if you decide to go with Mojave there are links to the Apple website we can point you to that will allow you to download Mojave.

 

[corymacs]

Apple will always try to move you to the latest OS which is Catalina, but in your case, being a "rookie" as you said, I would stick with Mojave at least for now. Some peope still have some issues with Catalina, for others it works just fine, but it is not a stable as Mojave.
You can always upgrade to Catalina later if needed, but I don't think there are any applications currently that actually require it.

However, Mojave may not be readily available through the normal downloads that Apple presents to you, if you decide to go with Mojave there are links to the Apple website we can point you to that will allow you to download Mojave.

i call myself a rookie as i have never really messed with my hard drives or OS's and such.

it sounds like mojave is more stable than catalina possibly. so maybe i should use it instead of catalina. i will check the app store on my mac to see if it will prompt me to downgrade back down to mojave (i doubt it will but maybe..? lol).

would you mind pointing me to those links that will allow me to download mojave?

thanks for your time my friend

 

[MacInWin]

Apple won't ever offer a downgrade. You have to go looking for it and usually a downgrade involves a nuke/pave approach where you reformat and repartition the drive completely to get rid of the more modern version and install from scratch. If you have Catalina on it now, just leave it there. All of the Adobe products should work (unless they are very, very old versions you are attempting to install). To get back to Mojave, you would have to totally erase the hard drive as Catalina has made significant changes to it that will not work with Mojave. I'm running Catalina and it's just fine. All you need to avoid are 32-bit applications as Catalina won't run them at all.

Just a comment on a previous post, just to be clear:

Bootcamp is not downloaded as an add-on, it is a component of macOS that allows you to install Windows in a separate partition and dual boot. To do that you need a license for Windows. You run bootcamp from macOS to create the partition for Windows, then install Windows in that partition and then install tools for macOS to be able to offer the option to boot the OS you want. If the previous owner had Windows in Bootcamp, and if the installer saw the partition, then the hard drive is still divided and you are not getting full access to it. So going back to Mojave and reformatting the ENTIRE drive will get that space back for you as a side benefit.

 

[NSMacGuru]

would you mind pointing me to those links that will allow me to download mojave?

Apple's link to download Mojave from the Mac App Store: LINK