MacOS – Lost between two macOS versions after failed upgrade to macOS Mojave

mac-appstoremacosmojaveupgrade

I have no experience whatsoever with macOS (Linux user).

I got an old mid 2012 13" MacBook Pro, which was running OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.5. I tried to upgrade it to macOS Mojave, by launching Mac App Store, and searching for Mojave. After some time, the process stopped with the message "requested range not satisfiable".

Now I am lost between the Mountain Lion world and the Mojave world, because:

  • About this Mac says Version 10.8.5. I also can't install e.g., Xcode because the OS is too old.

  • The Mac App Store says that the Mojave upgrade is installed, hence the install button is disabled.

How can I properly upgrade to macOS Mojave? Restarting the device does not change anything.

I want to develop and publish iOS apps, so I require a recent version of macOS.

Progress (I)

I installed El Capitan, Sierra and then High Sierra (yes, one after the other; it takes several hours).
It was quite difficult to find these updates as the App Store-Search does not show them. I had to google it, find the Apple-page which contained a link (under 4. Download macOS XXX) which is opened in the App Store. from there on, updating worked.

  1. El Capitan
  2. Sierra
  3. High Sierra

Now I have High Sierra, but I'm still not able to update to Mojave. I get the same error ("requested range not satisfiable").

Progress (II)

I think I know the problem. When I try to create a bootable installer (sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Mojave.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/MyVolume), it says

To use this tool, you must download the macOS installer application on a Mac with 10.12.5 or later, or El Capitan 10.11.6. […]

Ok, I have downloaded the Mojave installer when the OS was still Mountain Lion, so I understand that message. Problem was that I could not "re-download" it. I had to delete the /Applications/Install macOS Mojave.app/ -directory by hand. Renaming or moving to a different place was not sufficient. After that, I could start the Mojave-Download in the App Store as expected. The installation was successful after all.

Best Answer

I suggest you upgrade to High Sierra macos 10.13.6 and once you've done this then try the upgrade to Mojave. Sometimes Mac upgrades expect the machine to be at some level of prior upgrades.

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