Trouble installing Catalina on 2012 MacBook Pro - "An error occurred while verifying firmware"

[trs96]

Problem is that I get the same error message if I try the upgrade from Mavericks 10.9.5 to High Sierra or Catalina. Anyone seen this before ?

Message I get is "An error occurred while verifying firmware."

If you try again, you'll get the same result each time. Bad advice from Apple. People see that, keep trying the same thing and fail over and over. What is not happening is the latest EEPROM firmware update. This why "macOS could not be installed."

EEPROM is a type of non-volatile ROM that enables individual bytes of data to be erased and reprogrammed. That is why EEPROM chips are known as byte erasable chips. EEPROM is usually used to store small amounts of data in computing and other electronic devices.

Tried internet recovery, said it can't download necessary components. Nearly all the solutions I got Googling for an answer led me down blind alleys with no results. Keep reading for the solution (TL;DR) in post #3 if you are experiencing this during an older Mac's upgrade to an APFS version of macOS. High Sierra or newer. It could save many hours of your precious time.

Seems as if it's a lot easier to install macOS on a hackintosh than this MBP !

Installer log is attached.

 

[trs96]

Jan 31 02:41:31 MacBook-Pro OSInstaller[630]: SUSoftwareUpdateController: Service connection invalidated!
Jan 31 02:41:31 MacBook-Pro Installer Progress[208]: Ordering windows out
Jan 31 02:41:35 MacBook-Pro Installer Progress[208]: Unable to quit because there are connected processes
Jan 31 02:41:35 MacBook-Pro Installer Progress[208]: Connected processes

I even went back to trying to install the original OS X Lion via Internet recovery, no success. Very weird.

This is not my MBP someone gave it to me for refurbishing. Don't know the history of it. Had Mavericks installed and a lot of junk on it. Wiped the drive and then couldn't clean reinstall. I think the previous owner never upgraded past Mavs because it would never work. Failed every try and they had no idea what to do. It's the 15" model with an i7 and 8GB of ram so when new, it was a higher specced version of this most popular Apple laptop. Some say these were the best Apple Unibody MBP ever made. I tend to agree. You can remove the back, swap out the HDD for an SSD in a few minutes with just a PH1 screwdriver. What a great idea. Apple thought that was too easy.

Here's the repairability score given by ifixit. 7/10 back in 2012. After APFS versions of macOS like Mojave and Catalina came out, the OS "upgradability score" is at best a 1 or even a 0. One major downside of the 2012 15" models was the weight. This thing weighs 5 lbs. 11 oz. Compared to modern laptops, it's like hauling a chunk of lead around.

After the design of the 2013 models changed and took out the Optical drive, HDD and glued in the batteries, the repair score went way down. Really a tragedy in my opinion. 1 out of 10 score

 

[trs96]

Here's the solution that is often recommended. Didn't work either.

1. Reboot into Safe Mode – To do so, restart the Mac and hold the Shift key while restarting. To ensure you’re in safe mode, simply navigate to About This Mac > System Report > Software. The ‘Boot Mode’ should say Safe.
2. Initiate the installation while you’re in safe boot mode – Go to the Applications folder and double-click on the “Install macOS High Sierra” app.
3. The installation should go seamlessly without any issues and the entire process should take around 45 to 50 minutes. During the process, the system will reboot several times.

I'd tried installing on a Crucial SSD, that wouldn't work. Some people claimed the firmware upgrade only works when using the orginal apple HDD, not a third party SSD. So searched the net some more:

TL;DR version for those with the same install error.

Perform a PRAM reset just to make sure you're starting with a clean slate. It's another name for the NVRAM we are constantly resetting on our hacks. Press the power button, then immediately hold these four keys. Option + Command and P + R keys all at the same time. Don't let go till you hear the second chime sound. It's much easier resetting NVRAM on a hackintosh.

Power down, take the drive out, connect it to another Mac that can download a High Sierra installer. Format the drive MacOS Extended Journaled and partition GUID. Do not format APFS as the install won't work.

Install HS to that drive via a USB adapter, complete the whole install process on that Mac. If High Sierra is as far as you can upgrade, you're nearly done. If not go as far as you can with the supported macOS version.

Reinstall the HDD or SSD into the Mac it came from. Boot to the desktop to make sure it works. Now you can connect to the internet and install from a full pkg Catalina or other installer and wait out the long install process. It will reboot a number of times. I was surprised it worked for me after so many failed attempts.

End of TL;DR

Conclusion
I ended up taking out the 750 GB Hitachi HDD and installing HS to that using my old 2011 Mac mini and an external USB hard drive adapter. Transferred that HDD back to the laptop, made sure Wifi was connected, installed Catalina, took forever and a day. The firmware update finally worked after hours and hours of attempts. It shouldn't be that difficult to perform a simple macOS upgrade.

Now there's an Apple folder on the EFI partition and the firmware folder in that has the updated file called MBP91.scap. This lets you convert to the APFS file system. It won't work if you format the HDD to APFS before the install. The firmware has to get downloaded to the EFI partition during the install.

Here's the best description I could find online about what this firmware is and does.

/EFI/APPLE/FIRMWARE/MBP91.scap

Contains a copy of the latest EEPROM firmware update installed. When Apple ships an EEPROM update (as part of a system update or stand alone), it is copied to /EFI/APPLE/FIRMWARE/, an entry named efi-apple-recovery is written to NVRAM (run nvram efi-apple-recovery in Terminal to see the content of that entry) and on next boot, the system performs an EFI firmware update (writing the content of that file into the EEPROM).

The EEPROM part of EFI is the part that is loaded directly after boot. It's the part that needs to initialize hardware to the point it can detect keyboard keys pressed, display something on screen, and access the EFI partitions of detected drives. Thus it also contains a file system driver to read that EFI partition as only then it can actually load EFI extensions from there. This is the part of the EFI firmware that is always there and will stay there when your drive is swapped as it is directly "burned" into a chip.

For those who are not familiar with (U)EFI, think of it like this:

The EEPROM EFI part is what used to be the classical BIOS that gets your computer into a bootable state after power cycle. The extension EFI part on the EFI partition is like a boot loader, that takes over when booting the operating system supposed to start and it may contain any kind of additional hardware/filesystem support relevant to booting systems. Yet a dedicated complex boot loader isn't always needed. Also with the classical BIOS it wasn't always required to have a complex boot loader installed at all on your hard disk; sometimes the BIOS would just read the MBR (master boot record) to RAM and execute the code found in it and the system booted.

 

[trs96]

Here's a video made about the mid 2012 MBP back in 2020 when it was just 8 years old.

 

[c-o-pr]

After the design of the 2013 models changed and took out the Optical drive, the repair score went way down. Really a tragedy in my opinion. 1 out of 10 score

Has ifixit re-scaled it's repairability metric since then? Like how Geekbench has rescaled.

I've never come across a repairability report that regarded first principles.

The point is view is like car magazine reviews in the '90s where this year's model offers a resolution to a horrible shortcoming of last years model, but last year they were bragging about how great that same model.

I was hoping a lot of long term buzz over the Framework "changing the game" over sealed designs, but good sense says that reliability comes from sealing it up. To grok this sort of involves a concept of principles of modularity. For example, a slight ill-conformance of modularity could be good for the Framework company because it increases churn (sales) along the axis of evolution of that interface (edge), which can be effectively marketed as improvements.

If we're thinking about Apple and a plan to make a trillion from the app store while mitigating customer support costs, the edge of modularity is the network interface. They might plan to resolve a customer issues for the App Store, with a preference for just replacing the entire device. If a whole Mini is the cost of a midline PC GPU, you might imagine some creatives will figure out how make a 10 million unit game that works with stock Mini HW, which is exactly what we see.

I don't think there's anything obvious about how to draw the lines for a system.

It's fair to accept as a point of history that what we think of as the lines were set forth by the PC AT, and we've all been pacing it since.

We can infer that Framework's market churn will tend to keep customers busy with details of its "modules". As to how wise their design cut...? They are "freely innovating" at keeping nerds engaged with minor technical adjustments to their Linux kit while the industry at large is delivering epic, towering economies of scale.

If iFixit has some conceptual model for fixability, they're not forthcoming. And I wouldn't expect them to be, because like this site, they aggregate lore to help customers cope with the industry changing things better, faster, stronger than ordinary people can possibly keep up.

Apple has legion of customers who work a day job just letting everyone else know everything Apple changed since last year...

So what does a fixability of X out of Y even mean?

"After Apple removed the optical drive repairability went from 10 to 1 because the optical drive was the only serviceable part in the device..."