Old MacBook Pro recovery problem

[zdbc13]

I have an old (2006) MacBook Pro that won't boot. It gets to the Apple icon with the spinning circle and has a loading bar at the bottom. After a few minutes it turns off. I've reset the SMC and PRAM, ran disk utilities which it passed, and tried the recovery mode. In recovery mode it connects to wifi and I choose Reinstall Mac OS X. It shows Mac OS X Lion (10.7) and I click continue a couple of times it says it cannot find installation information on this machine, contace Apple Care. I'd rather do this myself if possible. I downloaded the latest OS Sierra and tried to make a usb on my PC but that didn't work. I can't find a source for Lion download anywhere. ps. I tried Apple Diagnostics/Hardware test but it only shows an exclamation mark and apple.com/support 3403D. I also removed the hard drive and hooked it to my linux machine with a usb adapter and tests there showed the disk being good.

Please help! Thanks

 

[th3p00r]

I don't think Sierra allow to be install on early macbook 2008 or older. You need to get an older version of MacOSX to do a reinstall, don't forget to backup your data.

 

[BadAsAl]

Sounds like a corrupt OSX install, have run into this before. You can buy USB drives with bootable OSX 10.7 installer on Amazon.

 

[zdbc13]

I guess you are right, I bit the bullet and ordered a USB installer. I'm used to downloading and making my own USBs for Linux or Windows. Why isn't Apple as easy? Oh well. Have a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!