Downgrade macOS Catalina the easy way... (updated)

this is a quick update to my downgrade from catalina video so this particular machine here is running catalina.7 and i've had enough of its shenanigans and i'd like to downgrade so before i downgrade a couple of things to do obviously you need to have a backup i've already done that if we go into system preferences time machine you can see my backup was today at 9 55 and i didn't create any significant uh data on this machine today you know other than email which will just pull down automatically also i did a carbon copy cloner backup so i have two backups the other thing i did i went into touch id and i deleted my fingerprint now if you have touch id you should do the same because if you hit a certain number of times you've erased your machine without deleting your fingerprint first you're going to run out of space in your t2 chip and you'll get this message fingerprint limit reached you should also sign out of icloud and make sure you turn off find my mac otherwise you may be entering your apple id and password and if you don't have it handy it's going to be challenging when you're restoring so uh what i'm going to do here i'm just going to restart with my option key down so you could go shift option command r which is what i plan to do but i'm going to start with the option key down because that's the easiest modifier to get caught and as soon as i see the graphical user interface here it is i'm going to go shift option command r and it says starting internet recovery this may take a while you see the globe turning so we know that we're starting over the internet it's making use of the uh the wi-fi because there's no ethernet and it's wanting me to choose a wi-fi network and enter its password so i'm going to do that and hopefully i got it right and then we get a little timer we press return one more time just select our network and now it's going to pull down a copy a very small copy of the operating system for what we call recovery mode this is different from normal recovery mode in normal recovery mode you have the chance to reinstall the exact same version of the os that you have now but in internet recovery especially when we hold down the shift key we're getting the oldest mac os version that your hardware supports now if that just happens to be catalina then you're kind of out of luck there if you have a 2020 mac or even a couple of 2019 machines the 16 inch macbook pro the 2019 mac pro you're stuck on catalina i'm afraid but anything else made in 2019 or earlier you can go down to mojave and depending on how old your machine is perhaps high sierra so this is a 2018 macbook pro 15 inch and it supports high sierra interesting thing it won't install high sierra from an external i have to do it over internet recovery it's the only way it will work that's some sort of a bug because we know it supports high sierra but every time you try to install from an external it doesn't work anyway you have a long wait on your hands waiting for this to load especially if you're sitting here on wi-fi you can see it says zero colon zero three it just changed you so it's saying in about three minutes it'll be ready for me to do something so i'm going to stop the recording here okay so when the timer disappears you get a regular progress bar and that means it's booting up from the little os that it just downloaded now sometimes you'll get an error here with a little number and it just means that something got corrupted during the download so you can power down and try again if you have ethernet it will definitely be more reliable for any of these steps basically ethernet is more reliable so here we have our language selector i'll select english by pressing return and then there's our utilities menu so we're going to go into disk utility and as is happening with a lot of these things you've got to go show all devices click on your solid state drives mechanism name under the internal section click erase and give it a name like macintosh h d is the traditional name except the default format it'll either be apfs or it'll be mac os extended journaled see this machine is not going to work for mac os extended journal and always guid partition map which is correct for intel max if you have a new apple silicon mac there might be a new option there i have no idea and this old apple partition map is for you know pre-2006 machines that were running power and that's a windows format so it's got to be the defaults and give it a name that's simple it starts with an alphanumeric character while an alpha a through z and nothing weird in the name other than maybe a space or two dashes and underscores are fine so are spaces really and then once you've erased the drive we exit disk utility and we click reinstall mac os and you'll notice from the icon here you can tell already that this is high sierra and then when we start the installer it's very crystal clear yeah this is high sierra so we click continue agree agree select the target drive install and away it goes so this will take some time and there's no point recording this when it's done uh it'll reboot and run apple setup i often get a lot of questions from people saying you know will my data still be there well only if you back it up you know do i really need to erase the drive yes to downgrade the os you really need to erase the drive you know there's a hack you you could try and install mojave onto the data partition of your um you know strangely formatted split drive uh that is the result of upgrading the catalina but its file system is not fully compatible with mojave and mojave will have trouble with the file system and that way is going to lead to disaster not to mention wasting a lot of disk space so no don't even go there in order to do a downgrade you need to erase the machine there's no if ands or buts okay anyhow that's all i have to say today thanks for watching fade out

Channel: Photo Enthusiastic

Views: 35,872

Keywords: high sierra, macos catalina, downgrade macos, downgrade catalina, downgrade macos catalina, os x, mac os x, how to downgrade, macbook pro, downgrade catalina to high sierra, apple macos

Id: -GY2Tt7Vexg

Length: 8min 9sec (489 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 29 2020