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Reinstalling Macintosh HD on my computer through Disk Utility

Hi! So I recently tried to partition my MacBook Pro 2011 to get windows on it and failed miserably. I ended up accidentally deleting the Macintosh HD drive in disk utility and I’m stuck with an endless loop of trying to fix it. The farthest I’ve gotten is going to internet recovery to reinstall macOS high Sierra but even though the disk is Available and is a MacOS Extended journal it doesn’t let me reinstall macOS because it says “this disk can not be used to start up your computer” I need assistance please! Thank you

MacBook Pro 15", macOS 10.13

Posted on Apr 20, 2020 6:44 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Apr 20, 2020 8:10 PM

While in your recovery partition, try re-formattig your drive that you are having issues installing macOS to but with the following info.

With DiskUtility open in the recovery partition, make sure Disk Utility is set to "show all devices". This setting is inside "view" in the menu bar or by hitting ⌘ 2.

Select the root of the drive we are trying to format, it should be listed as the Physical Disk.

With that selected, choose Partition and inside there make changes necessary to make sure it only has one single partition and all others are removed. Give it a name and let the size be the entire disk, set it to MacOS Journaled and format it. (All drive data will be erased so make sure you have backed everything up if needed)

Now try installing to that drive again and see if it lets you.


2 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Apr 20, 2020 8:10 PM in response to ReinstallingMacintoshHd

While in your recovery partition, try re-formattig your drive that you are having issues installing macOS to but with the following info.

With DiskUtility open in the recovery partition, make sure Disk Utility is set to "show all devices". This setting is inside "view" in the menu bar or by hitting ⌘ 2.

Select the root of the drive we are trying to format, it should be listed as the Physical Disk.

With that selected, choose Partition and inside there make changes necessary to make sure it only has one single partition and all others are removed. Give it a name and let the size be the entire disk, set it to MacOS Journaled and format it. (All drive data will be erased so make sure you have backed everything up if needed)

Now try installing to that drive again and see if it lets you.


Reinstalling Macintosh HD on my computer through Disk Utility

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