Hard Drive failed, can't reinstall on external drive
I have this late 2011 MacBook Pro (15”) that has been sitting around for a year or two now because it was so slow. I erased it and reinstalled Mac OS and sent it off as trade in. They returned it to me and said it wont start. Since it started for me I had it returned to me and I figured maybe I’ll try to upgrade the RAM and salvage it.
It starts for me but now after having it shipped back and forth, disk utility says the hard drive has failed beyond repair. So I thought maybe I can reinstall on an external drive to see if it even recognizes the RAM before I replace the hard drive. Starting in recovery mode it lets me choose “Reinstall Mac OS” (wanting to install Lion) and choose the external (reformatted) drive, but then it stops and says it is not able to download additional components for the installation.
Would there be any sense in replacing the hard drive and trying again?
Or installing OS X on an external drive from a different computer?
Or is this all beyond repair?