I have an old laptop that was first used by me, then was offloaded to my parents, and then came back to me with a log of crapware on it, that they had unknowingly installed. The computer had become completely unusable.
With its age of fifteen years I thought there would be little use in keeping it, and it was to be disposed of. But then I thought to at least give it a wipe, and maybe try to reinstall.
Reinstalling the Mac should be a straightforward process. But when your Mac is prehistoric, that does not hold anymore, so it seems. Sierra’s normal Recovery installation path was giving some weird error message.
Since the normal procedure did not work, ChatGPT helped me to diagnose. It turned out Sierra recovery was producing a corrupt/unmountable InstallESD.dmg. ChatGPT recommended to download the installation disk image from Apple’s site, and start from there.
These were the steps involved:
Apple Sierra InstallOS.dmg
↓
extract valid InstallOS.pkg / InstallESD.dmg on M3
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manually construct bootable Sierra USB
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boot old Mac into Sierra USB
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discover Apple's online InstallESD.dmg is broken
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transfer known-good Apple installer assets locally
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install InstallOS.pkg onto Machintosh HD
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creates full Install macOS Sierra.app
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verify embedded InstallESD.dmg
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run InstallAssistant_springboard manually
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Sierra successfully stages macOS Installer
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automatic bless/restart reports an error
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reboot holding Option
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manually select newly created "macOS Installer"
↓
ACTUAL SIERRA INSTALLATION
Without ChatGPT I would have never been able to get to there.
The full conversation is available online for those that have enough time to read through.
Now my idea is to configure it as an offline toy for our nine year old daughter. Guess who’s helping me do that?