Issue installing Yosemite upgrade.

The original hard drive in my MacBook Pro got corrupt and after a call to apple and a few checks they said it was probably dead. I have another macbook pro (few months older).

I swapped the drives around and the macbook booted up into Snow leopard no problems. Then i went to install Yosemite from the App store when the issues began.


it freezes everytime at the same point in the install ( extracting the same .pkg file). The drive is 320GB compared to the 500GB It originally had.

Ive ran repair disk etc and everything is showing the HDD is fine.

I'm stumped, my best bet to get a bootable DVD/USB to install snow leopard?

When i try to do the internet recovery via CMD + R it won't let me reinstall the OS as its snow leopard comes up and it says the drive has Yosemite (cant install over newer version)


Any ideas?

Edited by BuckleZ (Wed 28-Jan-15 11:57:22)

My guess is there could be a driver issue. Did you do a fresh install of Snow Leopard when you moved the drive across? If not then it likely is using drivers for the old MacBook and they may be causing issues with the different hardware.

No I just moved the drive across and it was working fine with the install that was on it.

It all stopped working when I tried to run the upgrade.

Is taking it to the apple store my only real choice now?

It's annoying that the installer started so the disk is showing 10.10 on the internet recovery which is only snow leopard therefore won't install as its an older version.


I'm guessing either a bootable snow leopard or take to the apple store is my only choices now?

You could possibly make a bootable Yosemite installer and start from a clean drive.

But, I have never personally done this so can't say how easy it would be.

I think i know the issue, one of the MBPs are early 2012 (sata 300) and the other late 2012 (sata 600).

Guessing whats causing the issue.

Changes of disk controllers can cause problems with drivers when moving between devices. Even though it boots it could be that something in the upgrade is making use of a component that the boot up isn't and therefore causing the crash. I would say a clean install would be the way to go.

I have much more experience of this sort of thing in a win environment and moving HDs between different specs of machines can cause all sorts of issues if Windows isn't reinstalled. And hard disk controller has always been the way that can cause most problems on a win build.

Yeah, im guessing its that. the cables in the 2 machines are different too, evne tho the ends are the same one is thicker than the other.

I'll head into the apple store on Saturday and let them sort it

Sorted, without a trip to the Apple store, the 320GB drive had 1 partition (Macintosh HD) - which kept freezing on installs. I made another partition named it 2... installed it onto that no problems. then, booted into disk until, set it back to 1 partition. and all is good



Now time to install Yosemite again, fingers crossed it was just a bad partition

All resolved