In some cases, this might be the end of the road, but I happen to have one more trick up my sleeve. I added this information to ist like so: Īnd now when I boot the installer, I get. My board ID turned out to be "Mac-9F18E312C5C2BF0B". To find the Board ID, open Terminal and enter: ioreg -l | grep -i board-id. You can find your model in System Profiler under Hardware Overview, where it's listed as "Model Identifier". Īll we need to do is add our Mac's Board ID and model to their respective lists. Inside, you will see a list of "SupportedBoardIds" and "SupportedModelProperties". Open the USB installer in Finder again, but this time, navigate to System/Library/CoreServices and open ist in a text editor. This is progress-we now know for sure that we're up against a hardware check-but we still need to bypass the check. If I boot the USB installer with this change, instead of a prohibited sign I'll get a message that reads: "Mac OS X is not supported on this platform!". Let's add in the verbose flag by changing it too: The important section will look something like this: Open the bootable USB installer in Finder and navigate to Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/, then open in a text editor. I don't know why cmd V doesn't work, but there's another way. How can I bypass this check and force my Mac to attempt to boot the installer?įirst things first-we need to get verbose boot working, so we can see what the computer is doing. Clearly, Apple has implemented some sort of arbitrary check to prevent me from even trying to boot this old OS on my machine.įurthermore, there does not appear to be any way to boot the USB drive in verbose mode. This is not what a kernel panic usually looks like, and it happens too quickly after selecting the drive. I then booted my Mac while holding down the option key to reach the disk selection menu, and selected the installer USB drive.Īs soon as I select the drive, my Mac immediately flashes a prohibited ("?") sign. So I created a bootable Mavericks USB installer and plugged it into my Macbook Air. If it's going to kernel panic, I want to see the damn kernel panic with my own eyes! But, I'm stubborn and I want to try anyway. Mavericks was not designed to run on my computer and likely lacks the necessary hardware support. However, I want to try installing OS X 10.9 Mavericks, because Yosemite makes my eyes bleed I like Mavericks. The earliest version of macOS this model ever shipped with was OS X 10.10 Yosemite.