facing some issues trying to install High Sierra on old imac, need someone to guide me and help

[Pizzacatt]

Ok little bit of history, it's a old mid 2011 imac, its last supporting OS is High Sierra, but ever since El Capitan I've been trying to update my OS and I've constantly run into numerous issues, I never really got too into fully fixing the issues coz I'd eventually give up trying for hours together,

I moved some things around my room and have it in a place where I can work on it and use it permanently, so I've started trying to get High Sierra clean installed on it.

Things I've done so far:

1. Have a bootable USB with High Sierra on it
2. Erased all drives and partitions (even time machine)
3. Checked for disk errors with first aid (0 errors on any drive)
4. Cleaned up RAM, even reset pram (or nvram? Not sure, but cmnd+opt+p+r)

Currently I've been launching into macOs utilities, I click on reinstall OS, go through the steps, it goes till 2 minutes remaining then this happens -https://i.imgur.com/mQG6bvk.jpg


That last 3rd line, xar_verify failed, keeps happening every single time, idk how to fix that, that being said it did fix itself one time randomly idk how, but then it restarted went into installation and then said it couldn't finish the installation and to run disk diagnostics, this was before I checked time machine,

Time machine threw errors during first aid, so I erased it and now it shows no errors, but now I'm stuck in this issue again, please help , I would love to have someone to have a back and forth conversation with if I can fix this up it'll be great help

Right now all I have is a High Sierra bootable USB, and a fully empty Mac, no drives have anything or any errors, if I could just fully clean install from us to Mac without internet errors that's be great, idk why everything needs to connect online it can do a verification after the OS is installed but all these online errors are really making life hard for me

 

[Fishrrman]

I'd suggest trying 10.12 "Low" Sierra as an alternative.

However, the real question to ask is:
With an older 2011 iMac, is El Capitan running well enough and doing everything you need to do?

If the answer is "yes"... I'd suggest... just use it as it is and be happy.

 

[Pizzacatt]

Well right now the mac has nothing, I had to erase both the macintosh HD drive and the time machine drive to properly even start the installation of High Sierra, so I can't really revert back to anything,

all I have is a usb with High sierra's boot files in it and a empty mac, I do have my PC but idk if I can really do much using my pc and help my mac, the problem with running much older OS versions was every software I use currently, like photoshop etc. don't support those old OS's I really just wanna get High Sierra installed once in for all,

coz It's been a almost 3 days all day all night struggle to even get to this, I'm looking everywhere for what that xar_verify failed thing means and I can't find any answers anywhere,

my other problem is, even the issues themselves aren't consistent, earlier today the installation actually went through and finished, but there was a error while booting up, I figured this was probably because of my corrupted time machine drive, so I erased it and checked every drive for disk errors and continued again after 0 errors, then I started getting this issue,

and again about a hour ago, the installation was about 90% done but then said it couldn't erase my drive to a fps partition, so I went and erased the drive to afps parition myself and started the install, but now it's back to this issue, it takes 20-30 minutes of waiting before I even find out if there's any errors, so the past 3 days have just been, wait, minor change, wait, minor change, I just don't wanna stop now is all

 

[treekram]

Are all the disks you try to install on HDD's? If so, maybe they're just too old. Disk Utility won't find a lot of problems or emerging problems on HDD's. If you don't have a SSD, you can try a 120GB Kingston which is available on Amazon for $20 - put it in an enclosure and see if it can install there. 120GB may be too small for you or maybe you don't want to open up the iMac to put a drive in there but maybe $20 is worth a try vs. all the time you seem to be spending on this.

 

[BrianBaughn]

I agree that Disk Utility will NOT find bad blocks that you may have and could cause those issues.

Also, how was the USB installer created?

 

[Brian33]

Looking at your log file image, it seems like it's trying to download and verify InstallESDDmg.pkg from an Apple server. That makes it look like it's trying to do the Internet Recovery process and (I guess) ignoring the USB installer. At least on that attempt.

I was going to suggest trying Internet Recovery but it looks like you already have?

It seems like it could be a hardware problem with the internal drive or SSD. If the Time machine volume is an external drive and you've already erased it, have you tried installing macOS on it? Does that fail too?

You could try to invoke the Apple Hardware Test as described here:
https://eclecticlight.co/2019/03/12/diagnosing-diagnostics-and-apple-hardware-test/
but that page seems to say that your machine relies on the code being on your drive, which you've erased. But it links to here:
https://github.com/upekkha/AppleHardwareTest
which has instructions on how to put the AHT on a USB flash drive and run it.

Again, though, I would suspect the particular drive you're trying to install on (it's not clear to me if you tried installing on any drive other than the internal one -- perhaps I missed it).