Install the latest macOS that was installed on your Mac. Command-R is generally recommended, especially if you never installed macOS Sierra 10.12.4 or later. To start up from macOS Recovery, turn on your Mac and immediately press and hold one of the following combinations on your keyboard. After I did that and booted from Internet Recovery to the newest version of macOS, lo and behold, I finally got High Sierra instead of Lion, which worked. The answer I found was to replace the cable, which is something you can do if you have an older Macbook and is relatively cheap. That connection drop leads to this error message. Turns out, the cable connecting my Hard Drive was busted so that while it saw the drive well enough, and while Hardware Diagnostics says it's fine, and while Disk Utility said it's fine, it was NOT reliable enough to transfer the files. But even when I had the original Lion CD, I still ran into this issue. And then I ran into this issue.įor me, not even doing a local USB installer helped, namely because I didn't have a Mac that was 'old' enough to make an installer for this version of macOS.

So I thought 'Hmm, oh that means Apple wants me to start with Lion, and then I can upgrade to something newer'. When trying to restore a 2012 Mac, I couldn't install any modern macOS version on it and Lion was the only one I could seemingly get from Recovery Mode. I'm not saying this is your problem, but, this is a problem that impacted me recently so I wanted to share it in case it helps you figure out what's going on.

Macbook pro os x setting