Can’t download the additional components needed to install Mac OS X
An installation error occurs sometimes for when upgrading from OS X Snow Leopard to OS X Lion “Can’t download the additional components needed to install Mac OS X” – Check your network configuration as the install needs to pull down software over the internet.
But the network configuration is OK.!
Check that Software Update can connect directly to Apple Software Update Servers not a custom internal one, remove any Managed Preferences if it is a managed host.
Option 1
If that still doesn’t get rid of the message I have found on a device that the drive needed to be reformatted – the only thing different about the drive I was trying to install to was that it had a Boot Camp partition on it The Boot Camp partition might be a red herring but certainly reformatting the disk solved the issue.
So:
- clone the main HD drive to an external disk use CCC – link below
- boot from the external
- erase/reformat the main HD – use HFS Extended Journaled
- clone back the main HD from the external
- reboot from the main drive
- run the installation upgrade again
This time – no problems.
If you don’t care whats on the disk just erase it and run the upgrade, I wanted to keep all the data intact in my example, hence the clone back.
Cloning courtesy of the fantastic bombastic CCC.
Option 2
Another potential solution is to remove any RAM over 4GB run the install and then put the additional RAM back in after – even then try and limit the RAM slots to one, so not 2GB in each – rather 1 slot with 4GB.
