How do I reinstall OSX on a wiped drive?

Anthony Schieffer wrote:

Hi all,

I let my son attempt to expand the BootCamp partition on my old Mid 2012 15" MacBook Pro. Since I am writing this, you can infer that the attempt wiped the entire drive. It had been updated to Big Sur, but when I try to reinstall over the network, it attempts to install El Capitan.

It will fail to install El Capitan with a message "macOS Could Not Be Installed on Your Computer". I located an old time machine file and attempted to restore from that, but it was not a full backup. I have now created a bootable USB thumb drive with Catalina (since I have not yet updated my main system) but attempting to boot from that causes a kernel panic.

Are there any other options? The only other thing I can think of is popping the drive out, installing OSX from my other system and then putting it back in. That doesn't seem like fun.

How to reinstall macOS from macOS Recovery - https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204904

—How to use Time Machine to restore your Mac: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201250

Big Sur does not officially support a 2012 MBPro. If it did have Big Sur installed and if it updated the system firmware, then this could be the cause of the Kernel Panics. I was reading an article earlier today about how it may be possible to revert the system firmware to a pre-Big Sur version, but I don't have that information at this time.

Try performing a clean install of Catalina. When booted from the USB installer make sure to launch Disk Utility and click on "View" and select "Show All Devices" so that the physical drive appears on the left pane of Disk Utility. Then erase the physical drive as GUID partition and APFS (top option). Then quit Disk Utility and select "Install macOS".

https://support.apple.com/guide/disk-utility/erase-and-reformat-a-storage-device-dskutl14079/mac

Edit: With a 15" model it may be you are encountering a GPU failure. It is possible to force the laptop to use the Intel GPU by using these instructions:

http://dosdude1.com/gpudisable/