Help with old MAcbook Pro - how do I make it boot up?

Fire Wizard · 11 Apr 2024 at 11:45

I am having a little bit of trouble creating a Mavericks bootable USB. I click on Mavericks.dmg and then transfer the 'Install OS X Mavericks' to the applications folder. I then open terminal and run the following command.

Code:

sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Mavericks.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Untitled --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Mavericks.app --nointeraction

But it then saids "Install OS X Mavericks.app does not appear to be a valid OS Installer application." I presume I am doing something wrong. This is using Catalina.

Fire Wizard · 11 Apr 2024 at 19:31

Sorry to hijack the thread a little. I have tried the above command with Catalina which works absoutly fine. Although, that's downloading Catalina from the App Store. I am not sure what I need to do with the Mavericks dmg file. If anyone has any suggestions, that would be great.

Feek · 11 Apr 2024 at 20:33

I don’t know. I’ve not tried it.

Fire Wizard · 11 Apr 2024 at 22:40

Feek said:
I don’t know. I’ve not tried it.

Sorry to be a pain, Feek, but would it be possible to grab Moutain Lion from you please? I would just like to try and see if I get the same error. Thanks so much.

Feek · 11 Apr 2024 at 23:00

You can get that from the link above.

Fire Wizard · 11 Apr 2024 at 23:10

Feek said:
You can get that from the link above.

Yep, it's a .pkg file which I can't seem to work out. When I run it, it also gives me an error message. I have tried various things from other forums but I am not having much luck.

visibleman · 12 Apr 2024 at 11:01

Have a look at Mist, https://github.com/ninxsoft/Mist, as you can grab 10.8.5 there. Also Archive.org is slow but handy for old OSX images, ie - Mavericks 10.9.

Fire Wizard · 13 Apr 2024 at 11:27

visibleman said:
Have a look at Mist, https://github.com/ninxsoft/Mist, as you can grab 10.8.5 there. Also Archive.org is slow but handy for old OSX images, ie - Mavericks 10.9.

Thank you for suggesting Mist and Archive.org. OS X Mavericks seems quite difficult to get a hold off. It's not avaible via Mist and the image from Archive.org is corrupted. So, I have given up on Mavericks. In the end, I have settled for Mountain Lion which I downloaded from here and then used this script here to create a bootable USB drive. Thank you for the help everyone.