Unable to Create Sierra USB Bootable Disk

pogslam wrote:

I’m using MacBook Pro Late 2013 Retina running Big Sur 11.7.2 for this particular task. Trying to do the reinstall on an older iMac. It should work to create the USB, right?

Yes, it should work.

I've never seen those errors with the Sierra installer before. Either Apple has changed the installer since the last time we've tried it, or something else is going on. Have you tried making the USB while booted into Safe Mode in case you have some third party software installed which is interfering with the normal operation of macOS?

What happens when you try using Internet Recovery Mode? If you are booting into earlier versions of macOS installer, then you may need to adjust the system date to some time in 2017 since the certificates with those older online installers have expired and may produce several different errors.

Do you need macOS 10.12 Sierra instead of macOS 10.13 High Sierra? High Sierra should be much easier to work with to create a bootable USB installer.

What is the exact model of the Mac which needs macOS? If it can run macOS 10.11, then perhaps it would be easier to create a macOS 10.11 USB installer. Once macOS 10.11 is installed, you can just perform a normal OS upgrade to 10.12. Not a direct method, but it may be easier than trying to figure out issues related to creating a bootable 10.12 USB installer (especially if Apple has modified the installer and introduced new unknown issues with it).

What exact model Mac are you using to do this? You can only do this on an Intel Mac. An Apple Silicon Mac will only allow creating a bootable USB stick for macOS 11.x+ even if you have the installer app for an older OS.

Ignore the SSD part for our purposes...

What you need to do is make a bootable USB stick using the Install macOS Sierra.app and the createinstallmedia command

in Terminal.

Put the Install macOS Sierra.app back into your Applications folder.

Open Terminal (Applications/ Utilities) now copy and paste this command into the Terminal window,

sudo plutil -replace CFBundleShortVersionString -string "12.6.03" /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Sierra.app/Contents/Info.plist

press return

enter your password

press return

Now paste in the createinstallmedia command for Sierra where MyVolume can be replaced with the name of your USB stick

If your USB name has more than one word separated by spaces you would need to type it in as

/The\ USB\ Name

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

press return 

follow the prompts

When that is done you will be able to boot to the USB stick and install Sierra.

Restart your mac while pressing and holding the option/ alt key.

After a couple of minutes you will see the Startup Manager, select the bootable USB, press Return.

The mac will boo to the USB you should see a Utilities panel, select Install OS, press Continue.

The installer should start up follow the prompts and when asked choose the SSD for the installation.

Sierra won’t install to SSD, thanks to Eau Rouge…

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251358124?answerId=252770772022#252770772022