How I Recovered My Old MacBook Pro

My MacBook Pro is from 2011 😬. It’s a real relic, I had forgotten how heavy the thing is. Poor thing, the DVD drive doesn’t work 📀 (What is that?! some might ask), and the 2 key doesn’t respond 🙁 (which means no @ 😦). But I decided to bring it back to life! Either give it a new lease on life or at least extend it a few more years, as the economy isn’t great 🚀 and it’s also not a bad idea to have a backup device.

Okay. The thing is, I thought it would be easy, but I ran into some issues that kept me up at night.

And since I don’t want you to end up in the same mess I did, I’m going to share how I managed to get out of the fix I was in.

Seriously. I tried all the top solutions on Google, but nothing worked. Finally, I found the solution. At least it worked for me, and I hope it works for you too.

The thing is, my MacBook Pro was seriously outdated, running Lion as the OS. I formatted the disk without making a backup or having a compatible installer.

I tried creating a bootable drive in every way imaginable, I swear! But nothing worked.

The solution! The light at the end of the tunnel came when I found a little program called Disk Creator, which helped me create a bootable USB from a compatible installer for my old laptop, downloaded from the App Store on my shiny new iMac.

I got the OS installer from this page, and the Disk Creator download from this other one.

From here, it was super easy! Download the old version of the OS installer that the App Store detects, insert the USB drive, open Disk Creator, create the bootable, and once it’s ready, head over to your brick of a MacBook Pro. Plug it in, hold down command + option + R while turning on your beast. Once it starts up, follow the steps, click next, next… and done.

It wasn’t as hard as it seemed a couple of nights ago…