Hello darrellsmith,
Mountain Lion Won T Install On Macbook Pro 15
MacBook introduced in 2015 or later MacBook Air introduced in 2012 or later MacBook Pro introduced in 2012 or later Mac mini introduced in 2012 or later iMac introduced in 2012 or later iMac Pro (all models) Mac Pro introduced in 2013 or later. To upgrade from Lion or Mountain Lion, first upgrade to El Capitan, then upgrade to Catalina. The current issue is with a customers MacBook Pro, the 500GB mechanical HDD has died. Have fitted a 480GB SSD and tried using the internet recovery to install Mountain Lion. After formatting the drive and starting the install i get a timer stating its going to take -2,393,938,938 and 8 minutes. Using an updated installer is convenient, because it means that if you ever need to re-install Mountain Lion, you won’t have to install 10.8.0 and then immediately install the latest big update.
While i currently have no solution or suggestion for your problem, i would like to mention that even though Mountain Lion technically supports your model MacBook Pro, i advise against upgrading to mountain lion. It will put significant strain on your system resources and most tasks will perform very slow. If you really do need Mountain Lion, at least upgrade your RAM to 4GB. I know that 2GB is the minimum requirements but you'll lose those 2GB by just booting up and starting Safari. Add the software you want to use on top of that and your performance will be severely impacted. Download apple apps on windows.
Also, make sure you have a good backup of all your data. Upgrading an older system and skipping a major release in the process can create some issues or bring issues to light that you already had but just were not aware of.
A possible solution could be to create a bootable installer on an external drive, instructions can be found here.
Mountain Lion Won T Install On Macbook Pro 2020
For your system, OS X 10.6.8 would be the recommended OS and will give the smoothest performance. You will, as you've noticed, be limited to the applications you can run.