Home Forums Hardware Mac Desktops & Notebooks iMac thinks it is new machine

Time Machine appears to have all my stuff.
I don’t seem to be able to make a bootable thumb drive.

Try One - I downloaded Ventura 13.6.1 from the site Artie recommended and installed it on a thumb drive. However, it does not seem to be bootable. When I boot using Option, I only see the built-in drive.

Try two - I followed the instructions at this link but bumped into an issue where my machine said “the shell” needed to be updated for Ventura (/bin/zsh). I believe I got that done because Settings>User & Groups>MY NAME has /bin/zsh as the shell. (FYI...my wife's account still has /bin/bash as the shell.)

So, I went back to Terminal instructions at this link and entered them. However, whenever I enter my password it isn’t accepted. Instead I get:

sudo: /Applications/Install macOS Ventura.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia: command not found
MY NAME@iMac ~ % sudo: /Applications/Install macOS Ventura.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia: command not found
MY NAME@iMac ~ %

Try Three - I tried the instructions at another site but the results matched the previous.....nada.


Additional Info: I don't know if this is related but will toss it in....I find that Restarts and Shutdowns take a very long time (i.e. 2 or 3 minutes) where they used to be quite quick.

It's not intended to be booted. It's an installer that launches when you double-click on it on your desktop or in your apps folder...wherever it now is.

Running it - if it runs - will overwrite oyur current installation and, hopefully, get you back to normal.

Addendum: A bootable thumb drive is a convenience, not a necessity.

If you are unable to boot from the Recovery Drive, and your intention is to erase Macintosh HD, the only alternative to creating a bootable thumb drive following Apple's Instructions would require the use of another Apple computer.

That says that you can do an erase & install with a bootable installer, but how is the erase accomplished?

Under ordinary circumstances, an installer merely overwrites the existing installation without erasing it, and Apple's document on the subject says "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," but neither suggests access to Disk Utility nor even mentions "erase."

OK, first step was to determine why ryck was unable to create a bootable installer, and the reason turned out to be that he entered a command that was incomplete in that it didn't point to the volume on which he wanted the installer to live.

The error returned by Terminal verges on incorrect at worst and, at the very least, is confusing to those unfamiliar with Terminal lingo.

Now, on with the chase, and I think I now know what a ping pong ball must feel like.

There's nothing I can find that's explicit about using a bootable installer other than to either upgrade an existing macOS installation or install macOS in an empty volume.

However, ryck's linked document states that
And, at the bottom of your linked document is a "Learn More" section, and one of the things to be learned is that there's a argument that can be appended to the "Create" command to "Download on-demand assets that may be required for installation."

So, is the former statement dependent upon the latter, and if not, do you know what the "on-demand assets" are? (I haven't got a spare thumb drive on hand, so I'm unable to experiment.)

I have not explored every possible option, but I have created and used several, bootable thumb drive installers using Apple's instructions. The basic set of options produced what appears to be a relatively standard Recovery Drive with everything needed to boot the system, format the target drive, and the installer with no need to access the internet. A DuckDuckGo, Google, even a ChatGPT query will turn up any number of articles from commercial publications replicating those instructions, many with screenshots. I have never had any reason to do anything else. If you wish to explore every possible nuance and provide us with a detailed analysis of the results, it might be useful in some esoteric situations.

Meanwhile, my new housemate Coco, is demanding attention, so I better go see what he/she wants.

What kind of dog is Coco, anyhow? Looks a lot more like a bird!

I haven't got a thumb drive available to experiment with, so I decided to use one of my partitions, but Terminal returned that I can't use an APFS volume to create a bootable drive.

Regarding the --downloadassets argument, a Google search didn't find much of anything about it other than "The new argument in the Mojave is called --downloadassets. The description is a bit sparse, but from what I gather this is download additional assets, like firmware installers and bundle them with the other installer files on the installer drive instead of downloading them on-demand during installation," which makes sense. I gave some thought to repurposing my CCC backup thumb drive, but in view of that "educated?" guess, I'll pass.

By the way, thanks for explaining that a bootable thumb drive is (more or less?) the equivalent of a freestanding Recovery partition. 'Til now, I took it at its name's face value, i.e., that it's simply the equivalent of one of the upgrade discs that Apple used to sell us.

Coco is still too young to tell for sure, but either a Cinnamon or Pineapple color phase green eared conure. This was Coco's third day here and this morning insisted on sharing my breakfast. I drew the line when he tried to sample my sausage biscuit.

The first step in creating a bootable thumb drive installer is to erase the target device, not the volume, HFS+ Master Boot Record which would have wiped out your internal SSD.

I posed the question of what the downloadassets are to ChatGPT and the response was
I have never needed it.

I assumed we both had the same understanding. Now I understand our disconnect.

Update: [color:#FF6666][/color] Not anxious to do a nuke and pave, I updated to 13.6.3 when it became available, and the update must have been pretty big as it took a long time. After living with it for a while and everything seeming to be okay, I once again tried Recovery using Command-R. It worked fine and allowed me to reinstall 13.6.3.

Now, the only question is whether Terminal works okay. i.e. did the Ventura reinstall fix it? I'll start a new thread for that question.

Despite the hopeful message above, although I have restored Ventura 13.6.3, using Recovery, things still appear to be somewhat askew. I have oddball things happening, like Shutdowns taking more that 3 minutes, so I went back into Recovery and it listed the following:

Macintosh HD Volumes
• Macintosh HD
• Macintosh HD – Data

External Volumes
• OWC 500
• OWC Express
• Time Machine

Disk Images
• macOS base system


I ran Disk Utilities repair on all of the above and each seemed to get a thumbs-up except Macintosh HD – Data (which is not a HD). Its report contained three warnings, which were:

- container has been mounted by APFS version 2235.41.1, which is newer than 2142.140.9.701.2

- disabling overall allocation repairs by default; use -o to override

- apfs superblock at index 0:apfs_doc_id_index_flags has unrecognized flags (0x10)

Greek to me but hopefully a recognizable language to someone else at FTM.

Does anyone else get a Recovery listing that shows their Data as a separate Hard Drive?

I'm being urged to nuke and pave but am concerned that, if I have a Data situation so different than others, I could be taking a chance on losing all my data OR that I could simply be importing existing issues.

So.....

Called Apple Support today and went through all the issues and events from the beginning. The support person said that installing Sonoma would clear everything up.

That was wrong. After installing Sonoma, I ran Disk Utility on Macintosh HD-Data (which previously had the 3 warnings) and it now has 15 warnings. Tilt. And other issues, like not having Downloads and Documents in the Dock, still remain.

I have disconnected my Time Machine HD so I don't get a load of Sonoma backups.

So.....

It appears, despite my misgivings, I am stuck with nuke and pave if I want to stay with Ventura (and I do). Where's my ulcer medicine?

Here's how Disk Utility shows my Data drive.

Same as yours shows in Recovery, I believe?

Not quite. Mine shows:

Macintosh HD Volumes
• Macintosh HD
• Macintosh HD – Data

I'm at a loss for timing.

I don't know if there's a snapshot as such in Ventura, but our setups are the same.

"Data" is showing as a separate volume, as it should, NOT actually a separate "drive."

I guess you see the same in DU as you do in Recovery?

Note: With the introduction of APFS, some of the older terms have lost their original meaning and not been updated, so, for instance, HD no longer means the same thing it meant in days gone by.

Not sure I understand. In Recovery I get the 4 options (Reinstall OS, Disk Utility, etc) and, when I opt for Disk Utility, I see the list of Volumes/Drives including my backup drives.

Not sure if this says anything but.... Not wanting Sonoma, I tried the Shift, Option, Command, R way to open Recovery and it gave the option of restoring from OS Monterey. When I selected my main drive I got the Error 21. When I selected my OWC Express backup (Carbon Copy Clone), it was quite willing to install Monterey.

I meant that you should see the same volume structure in both Recovery and DU.

That's well out of my range of experience and beyond my ability to even guess.

Just did another Recovery/Disk Utility check and the number of warnings has increased to 35.

I'm kinda out of my league, but I don't understand why you're getting warnings on your data volume rather than your OS volume, which would seem to be indicated by your problems, but as my grandmother used to say, "Oy, aveitig ist mir!"

Hahaha....seems like I should be saying that.

More like singing a few choruses of how much is that new drive for my iMac. Your boot drive isn't failing, it has failed and you don't recognize it.

Just to be certain, I'd still try a nuke & pave.

Because of the cascading nature of the failures is the classic indication of drive failure, I would never trust that drive in the future. But someone, with a penchant for high-risk gambling, might decide otherwise.