Not true, it requires an admin user login in step 2.
However, I did have an admin login now. But the system only installs Catalina, so not as helpful as I had hoped.
Wow… what a mess. I’m sorry you had such a bad time with this. Sounds like a massive headache. I personally have never had this happen, but computers can be fickle machines, even a Mac. I suppose if I were in your shoes, I’d try @AppliedMicro’s approach.
As long as the UEFI is intact that should work. I have done the network install a few times. It takes forever, but it works. Of course, ymmv.
Good luck, I hope you get this sorted out soon.
PS. I don’t think skipping versions of the OS matters either, since the OS doesn’t overwrite old files on an install, it mounts an entirely new OS volume, sets up some links, and then mounts the user’s data, IIRC. So, it shouldn’t matter what’s on the disk beforehand.
FWIW, I have also done a lot of upgrades that’s skipping several versions. There’s no need to do it any other way.
If you get problems when you do that (as Karl obviously had) there are other faults to that, in my experince.
Good luck with your installation.
Exactly!
Remember I was on Catalina. That is still a system with a recommended bootable backup. Which I did. It was Big Sur and later where they suggested bootable backups were no longer relevant.
I’m not sure to which degree they were “recommended” by Apple. But we don’t want to debate such technicalities, do we?
What I would also often do was installing a new system without migrating with Migration Assistant. Then just copy the user’s home folder and dropping it in the /Users folder on the new system. Create a “new” user with the same name, short name and password - and the system would offer to “take over” the user folder in place, i.e. associate it with the newly created account (fixing access permissions in the process)
Forgoing Migration Assistant of course means losing some system-wide preferences and files. But you won’t get a cleaner freshly installed system, while still preserving the entirety of the user account and its settings. A cleaner migration of user-data only than anything else.
And a good source for that that would be (bootable or not) full backup.
Update: System is working, had to upgrade a lot of apps I use all the time so going slowly.
There is STILL an unusual additional “hard drive” showing up on my system. It looks like this
and the contents are this
So no idea why or what to do about it.
You’re not alone with your new Update drive. A new disk drive (named “update”) appeare… - Apple Community
The fseventsd daemon keeps track of which files and folders have changed.
I think the other file is Spotlight’s index, so maybe the two together reduce the load Spotlight indexing has on some Intel systems?
I believe those directories are created for every volume, and if so that volume is essentially empty. I’ve read that the Update volume is created during - you guessed it - an OS update, and can be deleted. However, as far as I know this is not authorative direction from Apple.