My mother has a 2017 MacBook Air which was running OS X High Sierra. Yesterday when her computer said upgrades to Sierra were available and asked if she wanted to update now, she clicked Yes and went off to do something else. When she returned she got a message whose exact wording she can't remember saying in effect that the operation could not be completed. She clicked OK and got a black screen with a flashing icon of a folder with a question mark on it.
My brother shut the computer down manually, restarted, got nothing; restarted again in Recovery mode; ran First Aid and was told the HD was fine. He attempted to reinstall the OS from Recovery mode and it didn't make any progress overnight.
This am we canceled the attempted download. My brother tried to erase the disk in Disk Utility and do a clean reinstall. OS X Base said it could not be erased--that it was impossible to unmount the system in which the computer had been started up. The hard disk, however, says it is erasable...we haven't tried that. We then went into the Apple menu to Startup Disk. It searched for and appeared unable to find a startup disk. We went to "quit startup disk" trying to get back into normal recovery mode, and now we have a blank silver screen.
I realize her data is probably lost; that's OK as most of it was still stored on her old computer (this one is quite new.) But what can we do to get the computer back to functioning?
Sorry for the confusion. Any advice greatly appreciated.
My brother shut the computer down manually, restarted, got nothing; restarted again in Recovery mode; ran First Aid and was told the HD was fine. He attempted to reinstall the OS from Recovery mode and it didn't make any progress overnight.
This am we canceled the attempted download. My brother tried to erase the disk in Disk Utility and do a clean reinstall. OS X Base said it could not be erased--that it was impossible to unmount the system in which the computer had been started up. The hard disk, however, says it is erasable...we haven't tried that. We then went into the Apple menu to Startup Disk. It searched for and appeared unable to find a startup disk. We went to "quit startup disk" trying to get back into normal recovery mode, and now we have a blank silver screen.
I realize her data is probably lost; that's OK as most of it was still stored on her old computer (this one is quite new.) But what can we do to get the computer back to functioning?
Sorry for the confusion. Any advice greatly appreciated.
