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I'm having a problem with a 2007 MacBook Pro when trying to install Mac OS X Lion from an external HD:

When it boots from the HD, the Apple logo shows up, then for around 30 seconds reads a lot from the HD then stops and the little spinner shows for another 30 seconds then the Apple logo changes to a 'No-Entry' sign and it hangs there.

What am I doing wrong? I tried installing from DVD but it ejects the DVD, so I think it's broken. This also happens with Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

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Do you meet the following requirements? apple.com/macosx/specs.html – Gerry Apr 26 '12 at 16:41
What OS is your MacBook Pro currently running? – Daniel Lawson♦ May 30 '12 at 16:14

closed as not a real question by Daniel Lawson♦ May 30 '12 at 20:04

It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. For help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, see the FAQ.

2 Answers

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There's a number of things that could be going on. Here's a couple of them. If you'd like to respond with more specifics I might be able to narrow down the cause.

You say you have Lion installer on an external HD. You need to be sure you are booting from a copy of the Recovery HD, not from a clone of bootable clone of a Lion installation. The Recovery HD is a hidden partition, and you'd have had to purposely created it either with Apple's Recovery Disk Assistant or by using something like Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your boot drive. If that all sounds like gibberish, then we've probably found your problem.

If you are trying to boot from a copy of the Recovery HD, we need to look at where it came from. If it was created from a mac that shipped with Lion pre installed, then it simply won't work on another mac. If it was created from a mac that had Snow Leopard and then was upgraded to Lion, then it should work on your MacBook Pro, assuming it has Snow Leopard installed. You can't upgrade from a previous version of OS X without upgrading to Snow Leopard first.

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As already suggested, I'd check that your Mac can run Lion.

Enter your Mac's serial number at this website to get the low down on your system.

The 'No-Entry' sign succeeding the Apple logo means that the system found but could not load the boot.efi file (The system installed on your external HD is not bootable). According to Apple, this symbol will also be displayed when "some other issue" was encountered during the booting process.

I'd recommend reviewing the process you went through to create the installer image that's on your external HD. OSX Daily have a pretty nice article about the process. You might want to consider trying to boot that external drive on another compatible Mac (if you have access to one) to see if you get the same issue.

And yes, it sounds like your optical drive is unwell :(

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