Chosen Solution
I have a mac with no disk (damaged) I’m trying to install macOS on a new drive. The Mac boots and recognises the usb (pressing cmd+r and choosing the usb), but at a third through the first loading bar, before I see get into the utility, it just stops and doesn’t ever get any further. The usb works fine on other Macs and has Yosemite on it. I have tried removing ram sticks, using known good ram and disconnecting the cd drive but to no avail. I currently have no disk plugged in, to exclude any problems related to that, it shouldn’t stop the Mac from booting from the usb. When I plug in an ssd with macOS installed, from another Mac, it shows the folder with a question mark. The SMC and PRAM have both been reset several times. Any potential solutions are greatly appreciated!
You hit the expired certificate issue! Here’s more on it If you’ve got an old macOS install image, it will probably stop working today So we need to send your system back in time! Walk into my way-back machine so we can get your Yosemite installer to work. Now set the way-back machine to the year 2015. Restart your system and give it a try!
But maybe we really want something newer the last OS your system can support is 10.13.x High Sierra. If you are using a SSD I do strongly recommend you stick with Sierra 10.12 as a better OS. High Sierra introduced APFS file system and will install it if is see’s a SSD. APFS is very chatty and not well suited for SATA based drives, If you had a newer retina model with PCIe blade SSD then I would be less concerned. So lets go with Sierra! Get the newer OS installer here How to upgrade to macOS Sierra jump down to Step 4 locate the blue URL Download macOS Sierra to get it you’ll need to double click on it to decompress it and then follow this guide to setup a bootable OS installer How to create a bootable macOS Sierra installer drive
