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My MacBook Pro was dropped and the HD broke, I went to repair it and long story short, it had to be booted from an external HD. A while later I stupidly formatted it and decided to purchase an SSD to prevent any more breakages. When I pressed CMD R on bootup and clicked “reinstall osx mountain lion” the SSD did not show up. I looked into it and there is no way for me to make a bootable USB drive to install osx on it as the Mac is my only one. Is there any way to to fix this or is my Mac permanently broken. My friend has a Mac and I was wondering if downloading it from her pc is viable.

The machine icon you have selected is incorrect. This is not a Retina machine. Was this hard drive ever hooked up to a machine running High Sierra? The machine you pictured has major problems with the Hard Drive/IR cable. If so it may have gotten APFS formatted. If your old drive still boots, hook it up via a USB to SATA adapter and boot from it. Then use Disk Utilities to try to format it GUID Mac OS X extended Journalled. To make sure of exactly which machine you have, go here and insert your serial number from the back of your machine, then tell us what you have. https://everymac.com/ultimate-mac-lookup… MacBook Pro 13" Unibody Mid 2012 Hard Drive Cable Replacement