To access Internet Recovery, restart your MacBook Air and hold down Option + Command + R. Since you're unable to reinstall the Mac OS X Lion through Recovery, see if you can boot into Internet Recovery. You're correct that you need to upgrade to OS X El Capitan before you can upgrade to macOS High Sierra. Thanks for reaching out to the Apple Support Communities! From your message I can see that you have erased the 2011 MacBook Air and are looking to upgrade the OS X from Lion. Thanks for any advice / help you can offer thought it would be easier than this, but perhaps I was wrong!! Never reset one / wiped one to start again. I'm fairly tech savvy but haven't used Macs much past what you get on screen. I've got TransMac on my PC now and have a USB Formatted to Mac format.īut how do I get that USB to be bootable with (frankly, now) any of the OS X that will work on this 2011 Macbook Air? I was hoping I could make a bootable USB and get the Lion or El Capitan or High Sierra install files on there and load from that but I've had no success. This is the only Mac I have, my other computers are Windows 10 machines. which gets me to exactly the same point as above, with the same out: 'can't download the additional components'. I've tried several times, on different Wifis just in case.Īt some point I found out about the Cmd-R or Cmd-Alt-R shortcut when booting, which seemed to start 'Internet Recovery' or something. 'Can't download the additional components needed to install Max OS X.' a few seemingly random numbers underneath appear: 'About -2,147,323,123 hours and 11 minutes remaining' and then after maybe 30 seconds, this message: The progress bar appears, almost fully blue immediately.

Do the Continues and Yeses and Agrees, choose my Macintosh HD as the install location (120.47 GB total, 120.25 GB available). The current situation is this: I have wiped my Macbook Air 2011, and get to the Mac OS X Utilities page after booting, with four options:Īs I want a fresh install, I go to Resintall Mac OS X. I moved all my old files off it and wanted to wipe it to start again with the highest OS X that it will take (which I'm sure isn't Catalina 10.15, but I think somewhere online said High Sierra 10.13 was the highest this age of Macbook Air could take)Īnyway. It hasn't been used for years but I wanted to try to resurrect it. I have an old Macbook Air from 2011 which is running Max OS X Lion 10.7.

High sierra macbook air 2011