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hollowman Author

Level 1

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Questions regarding bootable drives for recovery purposes.

Made the mistake of upgrading from High Sierra to Catalina, and it killed an app i used frequently.

My plan was then to downgrade to an earlier OS, install that app then upgrade to High Sierra again (it is a stable version that still supported the app in question).

I could download El Capitan's, Sierra's and High Sierra's installers from Apple Support to start creating bootable recovery drives for. I know the command:

sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Sierra.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume/Volumes/CRUZER

To minimise typo, i use the "Show package contents" function to retrieve the "createinstallmedia" file and used the drag and drop method in Terminal.

El Capitan's installer straight out won't open on Catalina, but does so for Sierra and High Sierra.

For Sierra, Terminal returned the following error message when i eventually ran the command to start creating:

Usage: createinstallmedia --volume <path to volume to convert> --applicationpath <path to Install macOS Sierra.app> [--force]

Arguments--volume, A path to a volume that can be unmounted and erased to create the install media.
--applicationpath, A path to copy of the OS installer application to create the bootable media from.
--nointeraction, Erase the disk pointed to by volume without prompting for confirmation.

Example: createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Untitled --applicationpath "/Applications/Install macOS Sierra.app"

The bootable recovery drive for High Sierra was successfully created (same steps) but i then ran into issues during the actual recovery (missing files). I was tired at that point so i stopped everything and settled with Catalina.

My questions are:

1) Assuming i could downgrade back to an earlier OS to re-install said app, would i still be able to selectively upgrade my OS till High Sierra only? After all, i could still download High Sierra's installer today.

2) What then is the meaning of the error message i quoted above, that prevented a bootable drive for Sierra from being created? The same command worked when creating High Sierra's recovery drive, so i don't understand where my command could be wrong?

iMac (2017 – 2020)

Posted on Mar 18, 2023 12:49 PM

Top-ranking reply

HWTech

Level 9

60,422 points

Posted on Mar 18, 2023 9:34 PM

Agree with @MartinR on installing macOS 10.13 directly using a bootable USB installer.

FYI, with the Sierra installer you need the "--applicationpath <path-to-installer-app>" option. The macOS 10.13+ installers no longer need this extra option.

In addition, the Sierra (10.12) installer has been broken for years now where there will be an error when attempting to create a bootable USB installer (I believe it is a different error than the one listed here). A simple character change in one of the installer text files is all that is needed to be able to make a bootable 10.12 USB installer (no idea why Apple has refused to fix it and instead tried to hide the installer...no idea if Apple resolved this or not).

As @MartinR mentions, you will need to erase the whole physical drive as GUID partition and MacOS Extended (Journaled) in order to install macOS 10.13 or earlier.

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