MacOS Monterey installer fails to upgrade Big Sur 11.6.1 on iMac with ALL OEM HARDWARE

Has one attempted the update to Big Sur 11.6.2 Released Dec 13, 2021 and then attempting the upGrade to Monterey 12.1 also released Dec 13, 2021.

Who knows, perhaps there is something in 11.6.2 needed to prepare the machine for Monterey - pure guess work.

Though, have seen some users attempting the Big Sur 11.2.1 or 11.3 or 11.4 attempting the jump to Monterey with failures. In their cases, updating to current available Big Sur and presto - Monterey will install.

Worth a try ?

Hi,

does you iMac have an internal HDD or SSD? I know that from what I have seen, Monterey will not install on hard drives.

Beyond that, were you running the installer from a Standard User or Admin account? Did you have any external USB storage devices attached?

I ask about the two above, as both do impact the success likelihood, the former in a positive way (ergo run from you Mac’s Admin account) and the latter negatively (ergo, remove all storage devices (HDDs, SSDs, flash drives and SD cards) before trying the install.

I did have initial problems on the first Monterey install attempt; but I am running on a 2014 Mac mini with 3rd party (personally replaced) internal SSD (from OWC/MacSales) that had never given me issues. Following my own advice the second attempt, Monterey installed properly and has run well for the past week.

That said, if you want to try. Installing again, try my suggestions and post back if you’ve questions.

Cheers,

Anthony

CorvusCorax99 wrote:

"Supported"?

Well, there are different levels of "support".

1) Download installer via Software Update. Run installer from local hard drive. Works great for about 70 million people. This is the method that Apple actually tests.

2) Some other installation method that is actually documented somewhere on an Apple Technical Support document. Sometimes system administrators do this, but it is actually quite rare. I assume someone at Apple tests these methods before publishing a document on it. But once the document hits the internet, the clock starts ticking on its expiration date, which will arrive long before the document gets deleted.

3) Some other installation method published on the internet. Sometimes people try these. Sometimes they even work. Mostly what they do is generate posts like this in Apple Support Communities.

It's your computer, you can use whatever method you want. People who try #1 almost always have success and go about their lives. People who try 3,2 or 2,3 tend to have many more problems. Furthermore, even attempting 2 or 3 can sometimes make 1 impossible.

Interestingly, attempted to load from Recovery (booted from the external SSD) resulted in the "...firmware..." popup message that others with non-OEM hardware have reported.

I'm not familiar with any such message. This is where those screenshots, or iPhone pictures, really come in handy.

Otherwise, the installation simply halts, and the computer boots from the System Volume and the old OS, with "MacOS Installer" listed as a bootable option on the manual boot screen.

It is kind of like cooking. No matter what technique you use, you'll find un-scrambling an egg to be very difficult.

I recommend booting into Internet Recovery mode and erase the hard drive entirely. In Disk Utility, you'll have to use View > View All Devices to access the lowest-level hard drive structures to erase.

Use the instructions here: Use macOS Recovery on an Intel-based Mac - Apple Support

Make sure to pick the "Option-Command-R" to perform an Internet Recovery. Otherwise, it won't let you completely erase the hard drive.

The only supported way to do that is option #1. If you are having a problem with that, you can’t just say it “failed”. What does that mean? Did you receive some kind of error message? If so, what did it say?

Hi, I have the problem myself. iMac 2017 external ssd samsung. Could there be a problem with this? But how to update SAMSUNG SSD?

In later iterations of MacOS 10 and MacOS 11, Apple’s install would not always update the firmware of systems using 3rd party NVMe storage—even if the operating system itself was installed properly. Unlike macOS 11 (“Big Sur”) which required no firmware update, Monterey will not successfully install on a machine with an OWC SSD installed if the firmware is older than the fall-2019 macOS 10.15.x Catalina iteration. This impact will be noticed when attempting to install or update an OWC Aura N2 or OWC Aura Pro X2 SSD.

Any users who might be encountering this issue should update their system firmware to the latest (4xx.0.0.0.0) before attempting to install macOS 12.x on their OWC Aura N2 or OWC Aura Pro X2 SSD. We recommend confirming the current firmware version under System Report. The host firmware version can be confirmed under System Report –> Hardware Overview –> System Firmware Version. 

There is something happening where by the EFI Boot ROM contained Within the Monterey Installer is not getting Flashed to the Computer Itself regardless of OEM Internal drives being present.

What that is - Only Apple Software Engineers could possibly answer.

I have an iMac 2017 4k Retina running on Catalina and it is impossible to upgrade to Big Sur or/and Monterey. Even after having erased the HD it is not working, It is stuck rebooting for hours and not getting to mount the new OS, one or the other.

Not reassuring. : ) Thanks anyway.

"does you iMac have an internal HDD or SSD? I know that from what I have seen, Monterey will not install on hard drives"

All other comments aside, earlier this week I successfully installed Monterey 12.1 onto a 500 GB WD Black SATA drive in a Sabrent USB enclosure. It booted just fine; fairly slow as it's read/write speeds are in the 140-150 MBps range.

It's now in our safe as a "disaster" external bootable HD. It successfully booted from a pair of 2020 27" iMacs, a 2015 21.5" iMac and two MacBook pros ... 2016 and 2020.