Or put ubuntu or mint onto a macbook, haha If it continues to not work, I'll throw the ssd into an older laptop I have to make it snappy again, nothing much lost. It could be a different hardware problem, but since it boots into utilities fine (and safari works from utilities, the wifi works, the disk utility was all good, etc) so I mean it seems the computer works fine but for some reason we can't get an OS onto the SSD. We did not partition the drive at all we just formatted it and then tried to install that's the only reasonable thing I can think of that could be the problem but before I head my friend's, as it's a bit of a drive - am I missing anything? Shouldn't the installer have worked on the ssd anyways?

(It was late yesterday, I can't remember what the error was exactly.) It would check if we were ready to install, and then give us an error. But it would give us an error message when we tried to install El capitan, and we didn't even get the chance to try and enter our apple ID or anything. Once, we even got to the El Capitan utilities menu (internet installer or something? Because we didn't have an El Capitan installer with us). We had another os x installer on a disk (snow leopard?), but the disk would crash the system before it even got into utilities. I went to a friend's house and we plugged in a flash drive with the lion installer on it, got to the utities menu from there, formatted the ssd properly and tried to install lion, but it just would hang before the install started, saying that it had to check with apple or something. So with a broken hard drive, I picked up a cheap 120 gb ssd, and threw it in there and took out the broken hard drive, only to find that I could no longer boot to the utilities menu. I tried to repair the disk but the disk utility couldn't fix the problem.

It wouldn't boot to the desktop, but we could still get into disk utility, and it showed the laptop's hard drive was corrupted or not working properly.

Hi, a friend gave me a 2010 macbook pro that would crash upon boot in hopes that I could repair it.

Macbook pro os x download usb