Many thanks for taking the time to detail all this for me, I do appreciate it! Nothing more frustrating that going round in circles especially with an OS you're not familiar with. I've just done this and the USB stick shows as a bootable volume in the Startup Disk panel in System Preferences so I assume it should be bootable. With luck and a following wind, you should see the Lion installer in your bootable image list. Plug it into the Mac you want to install Lion on, reboot it while holding down the Option key and wait for the boot menu to appear.

It should then turn into a Lion USB stick and be bootable. Step 6) Wait an indeterminable amount of time for the DMG to get restored to the USB Stick.

Tell it to restore from 'Mac OS X Install ESD', then press the Restore button. Step 5) Find your newly formatted USB Stick volume in the Disk Utility, right click on it and press Restore. Format it with Mac OS Extended format and choose the GUID Partition Map scheme. Find your USB stick and click the Erase button. I'm on a Mac with High Sierra at the moment, earlier or later versions will look different. Step 4) Put a USB stick into your Mac and open Disk Utility. There's a DMG in there called InstallESD.dmg. Right click on that and click 'Show Package Contents'. Step 3) In the extracted contents, there's another PKG file called InstallMacOSX.pkg. Copy the PKG file somewhere, then use The Unarchiver to extract it. Step 1) On a handy Mac, grab Lion installer from Apple website here: It sounds like you've done this already, but here we go: in fact I lost count of the amount of ways it told me it couldn't do what I wanted. So, I downloaded a Lion.dmg file and researched what to do (after realising it won't USB boot), which is restore an image or something, which I try and get various error like 'cannot unmount disk', 'source busy', 'couldn't resize partition', then it asks to scan the image and tells me 'resource busy'. but apparently my Apple ID is too new or something and can only download later versions.

Got into Disk Manager (sorry 'Utility') wiped the disk and tried to do a 'Reinstall Mac OS X' from an online thing. I thought I had a fairly good grip on what to do (only internet searches as I'm no Mac daddy for sure)! There are a few more things to try before I admit it beat me, but to save me time that I don't really have does anyone know how to get the Mac OS back onto a Macbook Pro (A1211 - 2006'ish). After spending a couple of hours on this yesterday afternoon, (although I have to admit I'm not sure it's worth the effort - long story short, I need a Mac to do some testing for another issue, so I dug out an old Macbook that's been sat in the cupboard for a few years).

Mac os lion usb installer