Hi all,
I bought a used Mac that has a new drive and therefore no Mac OS installed. I wish to download the Catalina installer to create a bootable drive to use with the newer Mac. Using the older Mac, which is running High Sierra, the App Store will not allow me to download Catalina, complaining that it will not run on my Mac.
How do I get around this?
Thanks,
Scott
Is Catalina better than High Sierra?
MacBook Pro 15", macOS 10.13
In order to download Catalina that computer must be able to run Catalina. If the computer doesn't meet the minimum system requirements for Catalina, then you cannot download Catalina on that computer. Apple never considered people may actually want or need to download a macOS installer using another computer in order to create a bootable macOS USB installer for a different Mac.
@Barney-15E's suggestion for Internet Recovery Mode is a good one for being able to boot the most recent macOS installer supported for that hardware assuming that macOS 10.12.4 had been previously installed at some point.
FYI, here is an Apple article with links to download macOS 10.11 to 10.15. Click on the corresponding OS to get the hardware requirements for that particular OS.
In order to download Catalina that computer must be able to run Catalina. If the computer doesn't meet the minimum system requirements for Catalina, then you cannot download Catalina on that computer. Apple never considered people may actually want or need to download a macOS installer using another computer in order to create a bootable macOS USB installer for a different Mac.
@Barney-15E's suggestion for Internet Recovery Mode is a good one for being able to boot the most recent macOS installer supported for that hardware assuming that macOS 10.12.4 had been previously installed at some point.
FYI, here is an Apple article with links to download macOS 10.11 to 10.15. Click on the corresponding OS to get the hardware requirements for that particular OS.
Download High Sierra installer and install on the used Mac, then upgrade it to Catalina.
Or, boot up the used Mac holding down cmd-option-R so it boots into Internet Recovery, then install the OS from there.
You may have to use Disk Utility to first format the drive Mac OS Extended (Journaled). If it wants to install Catalina, you may have to reformat APFS.
Download installer on a Mac that cannot run it
