Deleting Catalina installer

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Level 1

19 points

Deleting Catalina installer

After upgrading to big Sur, I had second though to reinstall Catalina. But after seeing the performance gain, I decided to stick with Big Sur. However, I can seem to delete and empty the trash containing the Catalina installer file. I don't boot to Safe Mode, since I try using diskutil commands and it didn't help since the behaviour of disk mount etc has changed in Big Sur. I just find quite annoying that Apple engineers are so lazy that they will make such a mess with this. On one hand Catalina installer can't be opend on Mac and yet I can permanently delete it from Trash. What sort of idiocracy is this...

iMac 27″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Dec 21, 2020 4:07 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Deep Sky Diver

Level 1

142 points

Dec 22, 2020 8:42 AM in response to Tissot11

The only way to delete this file running macOS Big Sur is to disable SIP:

1. Restart your Mac into Recovery Mode (Command + R).

2. Open Terminal (in the Utilities menu).

3. Disable SIP (type: csrutil disable).

4. Close Terminal.

5. Restart your Mac.

6. Delete the macOS Catalina Installer.

7. Restart your Mac into Recovery Mode.

8. Open Terminal.

7. Re-enable SIP (type: csrutil enable).

8. Close Terminal.

9. Restart your Mac.

10. Have a Happy Winter's Solstice. :-)

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Answer 2

Tissot11 Author

Level 1

19 points

Dec 22, 2020 12:20 PM in response to Deep Sky Diver

Thanks for the answer. I had seen it on Stack Exchange too. I din't want to boot in Recovery Mode since it takes time to boot in and even after booting in Recovery mode, it takes another 10 minutes on each occasions for my iMac to recognise my Apple mouse to enable and disable SIP. So it's painful to boot in Recovery Mode twice just to delete this Installer file which is not part of the installed macOS Big Sur. I don't know what sort of crazy ideas Apple engineers are having to create these nuisances for the users. But thanks anyway!

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Answer 3

Tissot11 Author

Level 1

19 points

Dec 22, 2020 7:56 AM in response to Barney-15E

Installer isn't running. I could delete it from Application folder but I can't empty is from trash. I have changed the permissions and tried from Terminal with sudo too, but it won't be emptied from the Bin.

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