MacOS – Mac mini Problem – Won’t boot after upgrading to High Sierra (Bless)

blesshigh sierramacosssd

I bought a used Mac mini from a reliable source. He factory reset it, so we set about upgrading to the highest we can, High Sierra. I created a bootable USB on my iMac using the High Sierra installer. Inserted it, booted from it and installed the OS.

All looked good, and we got into the OS on first load. Upon restarting, it says “MacOS could not be installed on your computer. An error occurred while loading the installer resources”
"Quit the installer to restart your computer and start again". Weird, because the installation has finished and the USB drive is no longer in there.

It also mentioned something about bless but I can't remember what.

This machine has an SSD, I THINK when it arrived there were two partitions but only one now. I have no idea about SSDs, never used one before. Does it need a separate partition for booting or something?

Totally lost, would be very grateful for some help.

Best Answer

If you startup with the USB drive again, try to use the Disk Utility (available pre-install) to set the Startup/Internal Drive ("blessing" it).

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I finally made it work. It must have had something to do with an encryption I had set up for the FusionDrive previously. SOLUTION: I deleted the Logical Volume Group which resulted in 2 separate 'untitled' drives, i.e. one SSD and one larger HDD drive. I then combined those drives again to form the FusionDrive. After that, I installed the original OS X Mountain Lion via web recovery, installed the High Sierra upgrade via the App Store, and then went back to the recovery mode to erase the volume again and install the High Sierra OS from there. Now I have a clean High Sierra preinstalled iMac, as intended. I would like to use this opportunity to thank all of you for your support, which was extremely helpful for me in finding the ultimate problem solution!!

MacOS – Install older OSX a dual boot on a computer with OSX High sierra

Note: The OP has reported that this procedure initially failed to work on a 2015 MacBook Pro. However, if you read the comments, the OP eventually successed. The procedure does work on my 2013 iMac.

I am not sure I understand exactly how VirtualBox works, but I have always assumed the hardware was virtual. Therefore, if a particular operating system would run on one machine, then it should run on any machine where VirtualBox is installed. I suppose there are certain obvious limitations due to machine hardware, such as:

The amount of physical memory.
The physical number of cores.
The speed of the USB ports.
Whether the processor is 32 bit or 64 bit.
The amount of drive space available.
The speed of processor, memory and logic (mother) board).

The reason I bring up this issue is that I have a 2013 iMac that can run Yosemite, but I would prefer to run High Sierra. Unfortunately, I also have software (such as Adobe CS5) that does not work well with High Sierra. I have found it to be relatively trivial to install Yosemite as a guest in VirtualBox. The instructions are based on website OS X on OS X. These instructions also state that newer Macs have to fake the processor in order to run Yosemite. Since I do not have a newer Mac, I can not test to see if this is true. So, you will have to try the instructions for yourself.

Before anyone complains, according to the SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR OS X YOSEMITE this is legal to do.

To be complete, I have repeated the instructions below. Just so you know, the file Yosemite.dmg, that is created below, should be inserted into the virtual optical drive.

Requirement
1. Install OS X.app purchased in Mac App Store
2. iESD
VirtualBox Settings

‑ Operating System Version: Mac OS X (64 bit)

‑ Base Memory: 2048 MB (larger is better)

‑ Enable EFI

In the lastest VirtualBox, all the default settings work well.

Some people encountered black screen upon booting the virtual machine. They reported that changing the default chipset ICH9 to PIIX3 fixes this issue.
Prepare Install Disk
```
gem install iesd
```
iESD requires ruby-1.9.2 or later.
Yosemite & Mavericks

The new InstallESD.dmg is not bootable. Therefore, we need to create a bootable install disk with BaseSystem.dmg.
```
iesd -i /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Yosemite.app -o Yosemite.dmg -t BaseSystem
```
All Macs using Intel Haswell CPU (Macs after 2013) need to fake their CPU as Ivy Bridge in order to boot the virtual machine. Thank @danmccombs for this tip.
```
VBoxManage modifyvm <vmname> --cpuidset 00000001 000306a9 00020800 80000201 178bfbff
```
On Mac Pro Early 2009 and other Macs that have ECC memory, AppleTyMCEDriver.kext will cause a kernel panic during the boot. Thus we need to remove it.
```
iesd -i /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Yosemite.app -o Yosemite.dmg -t BaseSystem --uninstall-extension AppleTyMCEDriver.kext
```

Finally, I have included instructions for setting the screen resolution. You can only change the resolution while the virtual machine is powered off. To set the horizontal and vertical (HxV) resolution for virtual machine named VM name, enter the commands given below.

VBoxManage setextradata "VM name" "CustomVideoMode1" "HxVx32"
VBoxManage setextradata "VM name" VBoxInternal2/EfiGraphicsResolution HxV

For example, to set the horizontal and vertical resolution to 1824x1026 for the virtual machine named Yosemite hosted by an iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2013), you would need to enter the commands given below.

VBoxManage setextradata "Yosemite" "CustomVideoMode1" "1824x1026x32"
VBoxManage setextradata "Yosemite" VBoxInternal2/EfiGraphicsResolution 1824x1026

Note: The main display of an iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2013) has a maximum resolution of 1920x1080.

Best Answer

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