Downgrade from Catalina the easy way...

welcome to another episode of all things Mac I'm your host Jim fair well I decided to punish myself some more by installing the dreaded Catalina dot three and I did it as an upgrade from High Sierra and no sooner had I done that when I started to have problems copying files in the finder so I'm not really impressed I'm going to wipe this machine again and take it back to an older version of the OS I'm gonna take this opportunity to update one of my videos on how to install mac OS over the Internet if you start up with option command R you're booting over the net with the latest and greatest OS Apple supports on your hardware which in my case would be Catalina but I don't want Catalina so I have to go boot over the network with shift option command R and unfortunately you don't get any choice about what operating system they give you when you use these two options so you have less control over the outcome than if you do my other method which involves creating a USB installer an external USB installer a couple of things I recommend you do before you you race your machine I would suggest you go into touch ID if you have a touch ID sensor and delete your fingerprint and go into your iCloud turn it off and in particular make sure you turn off find my Mac because otherwise you're gonna be having passwords the whole time erase your machine so oh and of course you need a backup I'll say it again we're gonna erase the whole machine that includes all of your software all of your data so if it's not backed up somewhere ideally somewhere more than one place you know redundancy is the key to keeping their data long-term then you're gonna lose it all right so now you can either do a shutdown and then come back up again with certain keys held down or you can do a restart so I'm going to do the shutdown just to demo it that way so on the left hand side of your keyboard you go shift option command you hold those down and then you holding R and you briefly hit the power button and keep holding these keys down until you see the globe not the Apple logo there it is starting Internet recovery all right now I'm in an institution doing this with fairly high speed internet most of the students are away for reading week this week so this is probably going to be a lot faster than it will be for you at home if you're on the Wi-Fi at home you'll be asked to possibly choose a Wi-Fi network and enter our Wi-Fi network password if you're on enterprise Wi-Fi this isn't going to work so if you're on an enterprise Wi-Fi system you're gonna need to hook up with Ethernet so if you have a MacBook Pro you're gonna need an Ethernet adapter so you can plug even it in if you're in that situation of having enterprise Wi-Fi is your only option you could always do a hotspot on your phone although that would be exceedingly slow in my humble opinion so you can see here it says 4 minutes until it's ready now when I tried this at home last night it was said 11 minutes and then it went back up to 13 minutes and finally did finish after quite a long wait so again your mileage may vary depending on the speed of your internet connection you okay so here is our Mac OS utilities and you can tell from the icon here that this is mac OS hi Sierra so step one we're going to get into Disk Utility with a double click okay so here we are in Disk Utility you can see our solid-state drive has got two containers SSD for the operating system and SSD - data yours could be called something similar or it could be Macintosh HD HD Macintosh HD - data we need to go this View button and go show all devices click on the actual mechanism name and click earase now this is the point of no return once we click this erase button we have completely erased this Mac and we no longer have an operating system until we can install a new one so and all the data is going to be erased here at the same time so please keep this in mind you must have a backup before you hit this button I don't want to see any comments oh gee I followed your instructions and I lost all my data what do I do now well you would have to run data recovery before you write anything else to the drive and you know want to boot from another device for that let's not even go there shall we okay so we have successfully erased the drive you'll notice it only has one container now and I'm gonna close Disk Utility and I'm gonna click reinstall Mac OS and here's hi Sierra and again you don't have a choice about what OS you get it might be older than you want and I suggest you just install it and then if you want to upgrade to an in-between version of Mac OS like if I wanted to go Mojave once i have high sierra running i can pull down the mojave installer and upgrade to mojave right very very simple and you don't need that USB external device to create the installer that i talked about in my other video so this is a simpler method to reinstall mac OS we're booting off of apples servers and you know I won't bore you with this whole section of the video I'm gonna stop the recording here and you know we'll assume you know how to restore your data from backup so one thing I should mention about that if you did a time machine back up inside Catalina you really don't want to restore applications because you'll end up with a version of Safari that doesn't work in the older version of Mac OS you're installing it only works in Catalina and there's no easy way to get rid of Safari and put in a fresh one so that's it for now thanks for watching and fade-out

Channel: Photo Enthusiastic

Views: 123,688

Keywords: downgrade catalina, downgrade macOS, downgrade os x, apple internet recovery, apple internet install, macos catalina, how to downgrade, mac os x, os x, high sierra

Id: HhsSFzzAoPI

Length: 7min 22sec (442 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 25 2020