One of my computer repair customers brought in an Apple Macintosh Macbook Professional model A1278 2011 two thousand eleven with a non functioning operating system. I decided to perform an Apple Macintosh Lion upgrade to High Sierra, after backing up their important data of course. First thing you want to do is boot into Apple’s recovery menu.
I choose to use the command plus R keystrokes. You want to hold down both these keys after your Apple Macintosh computer powers on and you hear Apple’s proverbial chime. You must have an Internet connection to perform an Apple Macintosh operating system installation upgrade this way.
If necessary, you can even connect to a WiFi Internet connection. Eventually, after downloading some files you will see an Apple Macintosh operating system ten utilities screen. Now you will want to choose “Disk Utility”. Once in disk utility, you can highlight and select the appropriate hard drive to install to.
Many times this hard drive is labeled “Macintosh HD”. You will want to click on the “Erase” tab. Then you can click on “Erase” again. You will be prompted to click “Erase” or cancel. This erase process of the hard drive contents should only take a few seconds.
Now you may need to “Journal” this file system which is another word for format. You will get prompted to format or journal this drive when you go to install the Apple Macintosh operating system. If the journal tab is green you can go ahead and click on that to format or journal this drive.
You can close and exit that disk utility when the journaling of that hard drive is completed. Now you will want to look for “Reinstall MACos” or something similar in Apple Macintosh operating system ten utilities screen. Then you want to click on that menu item to begin installing Apple Lion otherwise known as Apple Macintosh operating system 10.7.
In the Apple “MAC OS X Lion” screen you want to choose the “Macintosh HD” or whatever you named your erased hard drive to. You can click on “Install”. You should see a progress indicator bar showing you that some files are now downloading.
Eventually, this Apple Macintosh operating system install should complete and your Apple Macintosh Professional computer will restart. You will be prompted with a registration screen. You do not need to fill this out as it is entirely optional.
You can leave this form empty and continue on if you want to. You will be presented with a “Create Your Computer Account” form. You do not have to enter in a password if you do not want to.
Also, you can enable automatic login for conveniance purposes. Now you will be asked to set your time zone. The next screen is used to calibrate your touchpad.
During this configuration process you will be presented with screens asking you to take a picture or select a picture. Finally, Apple Macintosh operating system Lion 10.7 should take you to your desktop graphical user interface. Before you begin your Apple Macintosh Lion upgrade to High Sierra operating system, you want to go into software updates either through the Apple menu or Apple Store application.
You need to go ahead and install any and all updates that are available. Apple Macintosh operating system software updates will require that you restart your Apple Macintosh computer. Once all those Apple software updates are installed and you see “No updates are available” message, then you can proceed to the next step.
I was not able to perform an Apple Macintosh Lion operating system upgrade directly to Apple High Sierra operating system 10.13. I had to download and install Apple Macintosh operating system El Capitan 10.11 first. You can login to your Apple identification account through the Apple Store application on your Apple Macintosh computer and browse to “Purchases” in order to download Apple Macintosh operating system El Capitan version 10.11.
If you have never purchased or downloaded Apple Macintosh operating system El Capitan version 10.11 before then, you will not see it available in “Purchases”. You can look for any other Apple Macintosh operating systems that you either purchased or downloaded. My point is that you cannot upgrade directly to Apple High Sierra 10.13 from Apple Lion 10.7.
If you are stuck and cannot upgrade to a newer release of Apple Macintosh operating system, then you will probably need to purchase a newer operating system version.