DoctorBashir wrote:
Would the use of SPUD explain why the same command sequence works with the Big Sur Installer, and not the Monterey installer? I'm not a expert on these utilities and the options. I just use what other posters suggest.
I believe the "createinstallmedia" utility requires the USB stick to be GUID partition and MacOS Extended (Journaled). If you use:
man hdiutil
and look under the "create" section and look for the " -layout" option which explains the various options for it like "SPUD" and "GPTSPUD". The "GPTSPUD" will give you the GPT partition layout.
FYI, Macs require a GPT partitioned drive for booting.
Yes, thanks for showing that there are other ways to archive the installers. I wasn't sure you could just store the entire folder structure of the app and have it work when you restore it. I work more with Windows where you can't just save the program folder and expect it to work. Will that work across OS's, for example, archive on Big Sur, and restore it to Monterey? What about user specific Preferences?
You cannot just leave the installer application on the system as is. Even if you move the installer app from the Applications folder to somewhere in your home user folder, when you go to download the installer again macOS will not download the new one to the Applications folder as one would expect, but it will download it over top of the previous installer regardless of where it is stored. I found this out when I couldn't find the installer and realized it had updated the time stamp on the old installer I had located elsewhere. Storing the app in an read-only .dmg archive hides it from view and preserves its integrity.
macOS restricts the download & extraction of the installers to systems which can actually have that OS installed. However, once the installer app has been extracted to the Applications folder there should not be any issues or restrictions for creating the bootable USB installer even when moving that app to another Mac which is not able to use that OS. I have created bootable USB installers from those archived installers on other systems which cannot actually run the OS.
Is your raw image archive file "NewMacISO.dmg" you are creating actually large enough for the installer? Have you tried making it larger? Maybe you should also remove the " -noverify" option from the attach command so that macOS actually verifies the file system on your image archive file.
Apple does keep changing how things are done and Monterey has introduced a lot of changes. It is hard to say how the installer and creation process may have changed. What version of the Monterey installer do you have? Maybe see if you can access a slightly older version of the macOS Monterey installer. I think I remember someone mentioning problems with 12.4 installer. You will need to use the command line to check for which versions of maOS are available to download.
softwareupdate --list-full-installers
If macOS 12.3.1 is available, then this is the command you would use (replace the "12.3.1" with a version available as listed from the output of the previous command):
softwareupdate -d --fetch-full-installer --full-installer-version 12.3.1
Here is an article for reference (I added the " -d" option so it will only download and not run the installer):
https://osxdaily.com/2020/04/13/how-download-full-macos-installer-terminal/
