I have a small Hard drive from a windows unit and I formatted it in Mac os extended journaled, it's connected with an enclosure. Downloaded the catalina patcher to the desktop and the installer to the external drive. Erased my internal HD and formatted in AFBS. First time, it seemed like it was going to work but just got caught in a loop going back to the restore page. I tried, manually installing the patches and none of them were checked. I made sure the version matched my machine. which is 10.9.5 on the about window. I'm thinking I didn't actually need any, but it still wouldn't download CAtalina and start. I erased the disc again and started over after reinstalling OsX back onto the internal HD. After setting back up as a bootable drive, it doesn't show up at all on disc utilities. I'm guess the HD itself just went kaput. Anyone know why this is being such a problem? When I have the original Os running, the external HD shows up and has info. I can open it off desktop and see the OS files but it can't find it in recovery mode. frustrating. I think I'm going to get an SSD for it and use the existing one for the bootable installer. I'm pulling my hair out as to why it can't find my hard drive. It's like this machine is actively stopping me from getting this done and I'm starting to take it personally.
Rich
Rich