Potential fix for "Installer is damaged..." error using Dosdude1's awesome patcher
Hi All. I have a 2008 MacPro 3,1 on El Capitan and using Dosdude1's incredibly easy patcher tool now that my apps are starting to break under El Capitan. Many thanks to Dosdude1 and to contributors to his patch and others that are doing similar things!
I ran into a snag when I went to do a clean install on a new Samsung 1TB SSD. I was getting an error similar to Dosdude1's Catalina FAQ entry "The installer is damaged, and can't be used to install macOS". I would get this error after I had selected 'Reinstall macOS" from the "macOS Utilities menu" after the newly created Catalina Patcher boot USB drive had booted.
The FAQ points to a mismatch between the patcher and the OS as a frequent cause of this error. Consistent with that, I saw a few other posts on the forum where people were requesting Dosdude1 to update the patch for the new OS release. However, I have concluded that there is no mismatch - at least in my situation, this error was caused by a different issue.
Walking through what I did: I downloaded the current patcher and had downloaded the OS via the patcher during the creation of the boot drive and so I was pretty certain that the two matched up. I did try redownloading the OS just in case I actually had some sort of download error but I kept getting the same error when attempting to install.
Like others mentioned is this forum, I concluded that perhaps a new incompatible OS release had come out after the latest Patch update so I downloaded
MDS on another Mac (it can only be installed on High Sierra or later I think) and used it to download the first production release of Catalina 15.7. After I tried installing Catalina with this down-rev Catalina installer release, I got the same error so this incompatibility issue was largely ruled out.
Concurrent with getting the install error message, I was having a challenge with formatting the SSD as APFS as is required by Catalina. As per the tutorial video, I was attempting to format the drive as APFS prior to doing the "reinstall macOS" step. It would format OK but Disk Utilities would fail to remount the drive. I took the drive out, put it in a SATA USB sled and it was recognized fine on my newer Mac as an APFS drive so the formatting seemed to take ok.
Eventually, I realized that because of the failure of the macOS Utilities/disk utilities to mount the APFS drive, I didn't actually have a drive available to install Catalina on (it took me
far too long to make this connection...). But at least in the end I was able to conclude that this was probably the real problem with the "installer is damaged..." error message.
More background - I was originally planning on just upgrading to High Sierra (vs. Catalina) and I remember reading a "how to" about disabling SIP which is a root level security scheme that was introduced with El Capitan. Here is a quick primer on it:
SIP summary from OWC. Following the instructions at that summary after booting from my current OS recovery partition, I checked to see and SIP was enabled.
So I decided to follow the High Sierra instructions and disable SIP. I rebooted into the recovery disk of my working OS and disabled it per instructions at the summary link. I rebooted into the Catalina Patcher USB drive and all of my problems had been resolved. By disabling SIP, I was able to mount the APFS formatted SSD as well as to get past the "installer is damaged error".
I haven't finished the installation of Catalina yet as I am now waiting for the arrival of my "new" circa 2013 video card as my existing MacPro video card would not support Metal. Onward with fingers crossed!
Note: maybe I missed something in the tutorial or failed to follow some of the instructions along the way so if there is a established procedure or a better "workaround' than my workaround for the above issues, please share! It may just be the result of me going straight from El Capitan to Catalina - anyone that tried to upgrade to an earlier OS would have likely already identified and resolved this SIP issue.