High Sierra Won't Install on Late 2011 Macbook Pro (w/ 3rd party HD, RAM)

[Tristana]

Heya,

 

I'm curious if anybody's had and solved issues with installing High Sierra on an official Apple product. I've got a late 2011 Macbook Pro that I've been unable to get it working on.

 

When I first tried installing it, I ran it directly off the Macbook's hard drive. The installer would fail each time I rebooted with message that "the path /System/Installation/Packages/OSInstall.mpkg appears to be missing or damaged". Thankfully I already had all the data I cared about backed up (though not as a Time Machine backup I could restore from) as the system was nearly bricked- I could no longer boot into the prior El Capitan install. I tried a bunch of things to no avail:

 

 

- Resetting the PRAM did not fix this issue. 

- Using the 'Startup Disk' tool and selecting 'Macintosh HD macOS, 10.11.6; (my prior El Capitan install) just boots back into the broken installer. 

- Holding 'Option'; at startup only displays the (broken) installer to boot from. 

- Holding 'Shift' while booting either just boots into the installer or causes the loading bar beneath the apple logo to reset repeatedly before an error pops up.

- Booting into Recovery mode with Command+R and running the 'Reinstall Mac OS' utility gives an error of 'An error occured while preparing the installation. Try running this application again.' Running the app again does not fix it. 

- In recovery mode, using Disk Utility's First Aid on the Macintosh HD returns an error of 'First Aid Process has failed' with 'file system check exit code' 

- In recovery mode, attempting to reinstall the OS returns an error of 'An error occurred while preparing the installation. Try running this application again.'

 

 

What did end up working was erasing the hard drive with Disk Utility and reinstalling an OS over the internet (I believe it went with Mavericks or Yosemite though I upgraded back to El Capitan thereafter).

 

Last night, I decided to try my hand at installing High Sierra again, not out of a desire to use the new OS so much as not wanting to be defeated. This time, I downloaded the full 5gb+ installer from the app store and created USB install media from it, also creating an El Capitan installer for backup if I needed it.

 

Booting from the High Sierra installer on the USB drive and attempting to install resulted in an error of "This copy of the Install macOS High Sierra.app application is damaged and can't be used to install macOS". Removed the 3rd party RAM I had installed, and tried again- same issue. Tried some other recommend things like restoring my Hosts file to its default state and disabling SIP, no dice.

 

At someone's suggestion, I booted back into El Capitan and then deleted the "InstallInfo.plist" file from the package contents of my High Sierra usb installer. I rebooted back into the installer, and this time I was able to accept Apple's conditions and select a drive to install High Sierra on- however, the installer then fails with the message "The operation couldn't be completed. Permission Denied"

 

So, I'm now stuck without an idea of what to do. My best guess as to why this is happening is that the installer is unhappy with the fact that I'm using a 3rd party hard drive in my Macbook. Unfortunately, I have no idea where in the world my original hard drive currently is.

 

Any ideas on what else to try, or a known work-around? In Googling around, it seems that others have this problem but I haven't found a fix. I'm not *too* bummed as my MBP still works in El Capitan- but now I feel challenged to get High Sierra to work!

[Tristana]

Update: I got it to work!

For some reason my MBP had decided today that it wouldn't boot to the OS anymore (the loading bar beneath the Apple logo would get to 50% then the system would shut down). Tried an NVRAM reset as well as reseating the hardware and connectors, but no dice.

Having nothing to lose, I booted into my High Sierra installer, erased the hard drive, and ran the installer. Annnnd... it couldn't connect to the recovery server. Turns out my system time was wrong, probably from the NVRAM reset, so I set the date in Terminal and tried again.

Success! The installer did an EFI update, then the High Sierra install and everything seems to be working now.

Now I wish I knew *why* it worked (or rather, why it *didn't* on the HD with a prior install). ¯\_(ツ)_/¯