I wiped the disks on an old Mac Mini running Yosemite 10.10.x and went to reinstall the OS from the recovery partition. It went online and verified that the system was eligible to install this OS, asked me to agree to the license, and then failed, because Yosemite was not available.
Following the misleading and at least partially incorrect instructions on the support site, I rebooted while holding down Option-R, and got the same behavior.
So I rebooted while holding down Command-Option-R (seriously, is a fucking boot menu too usable for your designclowns? has no one ever thought about replacing the ever-expanding suite of invisible magic keystrokes with a few lines of text? or even cryptic pictures?), and it downloaded and began installing Mountain Lion (10.8.5, possibly, although I won’t find out for 3.5 hours).
So, the OS that last shipped 2 years ago isn’t available for download, but the one that last shipped 4 years ago is? And I’ll have to upgrade through 6 major releases to get it current (hopefully without multiple intermediate installs…)?
Ironically, I only really wanted to get the updated firmware and recovery partition, because the spinning disks in this box are far too slow to run Mojave, and I’m going to crack it open next week, install SSDs, and reinstall the OS again.
If the upgrades finish by next week, that is.
(all with the goal of having a machine that stays at Mojave forever to run all the 32-bit software that Apple is screwing over next month…)
Well, that didn’t work. Turns out that was a 2011 Mini, which won’t run Mojave and is stuck at High Sierra. Good thing I have a 2012 Mini that already has an SSD in it…
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