So I believe I have solved the problem of loading a new OS. I am new to the mac world, but also run VMWare on it to run my applications that only run in Windows. So while I could plug in the phone and run it, apparently when it goes through the ram upload, the usb connection is interrupted and when it comes back to load the new RAM image, it gets the USB connection confused. I went to work today and tried again on a straight up PC, and it worked just fine.
Moral of the story, even if you run Windows via VMWare, you still cannot load new OS's with a mac. It may have worked if I had loaded up a bootcamp session of windows instead of VMWare. But now that I have got it, I am not trying again.
Thanks for taking the time to read and hopefully this helps someone else out there.
Cheers,