macOS Ventura 13.2
I posted on twitter "What could possibly go wrong?" And for my Mac computers with Apple silicon nothing went wrong, and a fellow mac user (@scarychildren on twitter) chided me a little saying "Literally never had an issue with a macOS update in over 20 years". But my new (to me) i7 based Mac Mini 8,1 - the last Intel Mac Mini - which is supported by macOS Ventura the update needed me to get into the depths of macOS like it was 2009.
TL:DR macOS updates are usually fine these days but they can get messy and if they do theres a set of steps you can take to cleanly install.
Most of this happened on Twitter but I thought I'd write it up. Two Macs with Apple silicon (a Macbook Pro and an Apple Studio) updated successfully, but one Mac with Intel processor gave me a fairly cryptic error.
This error led me to think it migh be associated with some kind of connectivity issue with Apple's servers, so I tried Internet Recovery (⌘ - Option - R) on boot.
Internet Recovery reminds me of the logo for AppleLink ( you have to be quite old to remember it )
Apples error from Internet recovery is annoyingly different and similarly non specific.
I rebooted and loaded the wonderfully detailed tool SilentKnight and it told me that my EFI firmware was out of date. I wondered if that is the issue. So I created a USB installer to reinstall macOS Ventura 'the hard way'. See https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201372. This is something I'm quite familiar with having used USB Installers to keep my Xserve's updated far beyond their original supported releases of macOS.
Here's my terminal creating a bootable installer for macOS Ventura.
I really thought that would be it, but no! I next tried to boot my USB macOS installer. To boot from an alternate disk you need to turn on your Mac, then immediately press and hold the ⌥ key. Apple say that a bootable installer doesn't download macOS from the internet, but it does require an internet connection to get firmware and other information specific to the Mac model. I encountered a very 80's macOS style error message.
Reading the support note from Apple I realised I needed to use the Startup Security Utility to allow booting from external or removable media. So I did that, and rebooted from USB again. No joy! Same -1008F error. There must be something else. Searching for -1008F error got me the answer. “After disabling Activation Lock, you should be able to start up from macOS Recovery without a -1008F error. When you're done using macOS Recovery, you can enable Activation Lock again.” To disable Activation Lock, turn off Find My Mac.
Fingers crossed it got past the Internet check and really finally booted from USB. (It’s a Mac Mini not the venerable Apple Xserve in the shot below). The USB stick is handy because it has an activity light that flashes blue so you can see whats going on.
And finally the macOS installer decides a software update, presumably the firmware update, is needed.
After the software update macOS rebooted, and used the internal boot drive, not the USB boot. So I was able to run SilentKnight again and sure enough the EFI firmware was now up to date
So now I decided to install from the downloaded installer from the internal drive to see if the EFI firmware was the issue blocking the update.
And finally it proceeded to the point of being ready to install!
And on checking the following morning (these installers are best not watched. macOS can take a long time to install).
Summary of Steps
- Steps: Update fails - cryptic error
- Internet recovery fails - error
- SilentKnight determines EFI firmware outdated
- Create bootable macOS USB
- Change Startup Security settings
- Disable Activation Lock
- Boot USB which performs Firmware Update
- Reboot and update macOS
Difficulty level
Hard
References
See also:
