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Computer Specific Releases

I was having trouble with my Mac Book Air. The installed OS X was damaged and, for reasons I cannot explain, it would not re-install from the recovery boot.


So I decided to try going around the other way. I installed Mountain Lion from the Install link in the App Store by which I upgraded to MtLion on my iMac. I installed MtLion on an external hard drive. When I 'ejected' it from the iMac and attached it to the MBA, it would not boot.


I asked around, and someone told me there were Machine Specific releases. Files that were installed on the OS based on what hardward you were using. They pointed mt to this message:


Yes. Machine-specific discs are only usable with those machines. See

Computer-specific Mac OS X releases.


That article is interesting. It also has a number o flinks to other articles and every one of those links are dead. Instead of the referenced article they take you to the Apple.com support page.


Anyone know how to get the articles that were referenced?


Thanks.

iMac, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3), 27-inch Mid 2011 2.7 Ghz Intel Core

Posted on Jul 17, 2013 8:45 PM

Reply
3 replies

Jul 17, 2013 8:58 PM in response to bkitchin

I don't know about the linked articles, but yes, machines ship with hardware-specific builds when they're new:


http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1159


Typically at a later point, an installer becomes available (say the machine ships with a machine-specific build of 10.8.3... it would be 10.8.4), that can boot all machines.


In general, you shouldn't need to worry about it. Instead of downloading an installer to a USB stick, you should just boot using command-R and from the recovery partition, the correct build will be downloaded for the hardware you're on.

Jul 17, 2013 9:18 PM in response to William Lloyd

You missed the point I made that my recovery boot did not work and I cannot explain that. It owuld boot into the recovery procedure that let me run Disk Util and help. When I tried Re-install OS X it seem to try, but after I selected the target disk, it said it was logging into the App Store (presumably to check my rights to install that version. That was suggested by a mesage I received along the way). It never got past the logging into the App Store. The network was working fine, I was able to browse the help screens at least and the cmoputer in the same room on the same network could log into App Store with not problem.


I only went to the idea of installing a download from the APp store BECAUSE the Recovery Disk didn't work. SOmeone told me that for Post 2010 MBA, if I held Cmd and Option (he said Alt, but that treanslated to Option on my keyboard) and R, it would do an internet recovery that would reload the version that shipped with the computer. Since it is a new ocmputer that was MtLion. I have to check, but I htink the Recovery Partition was recreated also so it should work now.


So as you said, IF hte recovery disk worked I woulldn't ahve needed to worry about it.


Why it got so bad, I have no idea. Through this I learned two things: The internet recovery boot and The mahine specific install. Apparently there are cases when an OS X install on a machine other than the target one will not work on the target one both being Intel machines. That I didn't expect. Don't know why. but my compuer is working so I'll just try to avoid stuff that might get me in trouble again.

Jul 17, 2013 9:22 PM in response to bkitchin

Here's a Kbase on OS X Recovery vs. Internet Recovery:


http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4718


If your recovery partition doesn't exist (perhaps new hard drive) or is "hosed," then Internet Recovery should work. If it doesn't work, something's really messed up. I want to make sure you have the right key combinations as there are separate ones to select recovery vs. internet recovery.

Computer Specific Releases

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