This article is dedicated to my co-worker and more than a sister friend Lorena Díaz after having suffered a failure in the installation of the new macOS High Sierra on her Macbook Air from 2012. It all started when, after having successfully configured her new iPhone 8 Plus, a phone I have long longed for, He asked me to clean his MacBook Air's operating system.
This is a 2012-inch Macbook Air from 13 that, after cleaning and uninstalling the applications that you no longer used or had installed without sense, needed a system update to be able to solve an error with an outlook account that has not been added to Mail due to a strange incompatibility.
The first thing I did was check what operating system the Mac was running and I saw that it was OSX Yosemite, so I told him that he should update the system to the current one, even more so when I knew what had happened in the last weeks with Intel processor problems. At no time do we doubt it and We entered the Mac App Store to download the latest version of macOS High Sierra.
The computer ran everything very fast despite the 2GB of RAM that this model has and the installation began. And it is at this point that I think a mistake was made, pausing the installation. The system reported that there were 46 min to finish installing the new system and she had to go home so we verified that by lowering the laptop cover everything remained the same and when opening it the installation continued. So it was, the installation continued so he closed the lid, the laptop was put into suspension and went home where he had to put it back on to finish the installation.
What was your surprise when the next day, when you agreed that you had to open the laptop to continue with the installation, the system told you that there was a problem with the installation file and that it had to be restarted to retry.
He quickly called me and told me what happened and that is where I had to go testing procedures until I got to what I want to tell you, since it is what made me recover the OSX Yosemite operating system and thus be able to start the process again.
Every time the computer restarted it showed the same error again. Could not finish the installation of macOS High Sierra due to a failure in the installation file. At this point, I could only think of a loss of all the information on the computer, but in the end, by doing the following, the old system could be reinstalled and the data preserved:
- We turn off the computer completely by pressing the power button for 5-6 seconds.
- Now we press the power button and just after we press the «option» key to start the Boot Loader.
- We select the Recovery partition, in your case with OSX 10.10.5
- Now we are shown a window in which we can select Reinstall OSX. We click on it.
- We select the disk where we want it to be reinstalled, which is the same one it was installed on and we wait.
- The system reinstalls the system and as we have not erased the disk previously in the reinstallation, the data that was in it is still in the same place and intact.
