Off Topic - Lion- Recovering from internet

seanjsgallagher
Contributor

I wanted to see if anyone else out there had seen this issue and might know what is needed to fix it. At work whenever I boot to the recovery partition and try to re-install Lion from the internet It starts out, says it will take about 5 hours and then ultimately fails! I have made sure I have a good network connection and can surf the internet. I have tried wired and wireless. I called apple and they only say to have port 80 open. I can take the same computer and take it home and it will do the re-install in less then 30 minutes. If anyone at all has any suggestions please let me know I would appreciate it.

3 REPLIES 3

jhalvorson
Valued Contributor

My experience has been similar to yours.

While using the "Reinstall Mac OS X" application, you can view the log by selecting from the Window menu > Installer Log. Then change the view from "Show Errors Only" to "Show All Logs". This might help show you what part of the process is failing.

When I attempt to do a reinstall while on my enterprise network connection, the process says it will take 3 hours, but after 45 minute it fails with a chunk validation error. (Speedtest.net, reports that we have 100Mbps download.) I have had the same results since the release of Lion. I thought I read that it might be due to the type of NAT we use or some network security boxes we have in place.

While at work using our guest network to the Internet via Charter cable modem, the process begins by reporting that it will take 3 hours and it really does take 3 hours. The download and install is successful. (I don't recall the network bandwidth numbers for this connection.)

When I attempt to the do the same from home, the process begins by reporting that it will take 3 hours, but really only takes 2 hours. The download and install is successful. (Speedtest.net says that I have 20Mbps download.)

talkingmoose
Moderator
Moderator

Speed isn't everything and speed tests don't account for very large files. Do you have a caching proxy on your network and is it scanning your downloads for viruses?

I've had to request that all downloads from apple.com not be scanned at our proxy because many of the files are very large (hundreds of MB) and would often time out on the Mac because the proxy hadn't finished caching and scanning.

bajones
Contributor II

At my location, our content filter authenticates us using our AD credentials and a small agent running in the background. I found that when performing an internet recovery I had to open safari and authenticate to our content filter manually before the install would proceed, due to the agent not running in the recovery HD. Not sure if this would help you, but it's something to think about.