How to get the Yosemite .dmg file to upgrade from Snow Leopard

[trs96]

Apple has made these links available for those needing to upgrade from Snow Leopard. You don't need to sign in to the App Store to get these versions of the Mac Operating System. Make sure you've updated Snow Leopard to 10.6.8 first before you try to make a Yosemite USB installer. Use the 10.6.8 combo update from Apple's support page.

Click through the provided links to download the DMG. Note that these are not the combo updates. They are the full versions of macOS Yosemite through Sierra. If you need to download one and don't have a Mac you can use any PC. Then transfer the the .DMG to either an NTFS or ExFAT formatted drive (each .DMG is over 5GB, FAT32 won't work) and copy it to your Snow Leopard drive after you've installed from the DVD with iBoot.

If you need to upgrade Snow Leopard, I'd suggest starting with Yosemite.

OS X Yosemite

http://updates-http.cdn-apple.com/2019/cert/061-41343-20191023-02465f92-3ab5-4c92-bfe2-b725447a070d/InstallMacOSX.dmg

Find the upgrade directions here:

1. Double click on the .dmg file to mount it.

2. The .pkg file may will open very slowly in Snow Leopard. Be patient and wait a long time.
Snow Leopard is now over 10 years old. Click through all the prompts that come up.

3. Find your OS X Yosemite installer in Applications.

4. Eject the disk image that you'll see mounted on your desktop

5. Don't try to open the Yosemite installer from Applications and upgrade the Snow Leopard 10.6.8 drive. It's going to cause a kernel panic on the first reboot. Your other better option is to use the Terminal to make your Yosemite USB installer. You will format the Snow Leopard drive and clean install over that. Or use a separate clean drive.

Here's the article with the terminal commands to run, in Option #3: https://www.macworld.com/article/23...otable-os-x-10-10-yosemite-install-drive.html Enter each command one at a time and let it complete before entering the next one. Takes some patience.

Before booting from the Yosemite USB you must install the Chimera bootloader (4.1.0) to the USB.
https://www.tonymacx86.com/resources/chimera-4-1-0.258/

Fakesmc kext is also required to boot your USB. Find that in Downloads/kexts on this site as well.
Have your PC BIOS set to legacy booting and then install OS X Yosemite to the hard drive.

6. The Safari browser you get with Snow Leopard is too old to work with tonymacx86.com and most sites. You should download the the Chrome browser for Snow Leopard which works much better. https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/ The newest version of Chrome you can use is: 49.0.2623.112 (64-bit)

Legal Note: these are perfectly legal .dmg files as they are direct from Apple.com. Do not download them from anywhere else. Also note that these should not be redistributed in any way. They are only for your personal use. Direct anyone else that needs them to download from the official Apple.com links provided. Putting these files online for download somewhere else is still software piracy even though this software is free of charge.

Here are the shortened links to all the Apple Support pages for each version of OS X and macOS

Apple has now re-signed and re-released older installers, giving them a new expiration date of 14 April 2029—nearly 10 years in the future. If you want to rebuild your archive, you can download new installers from links on these pages:

• macOS 10.15 Catalina
• macOS 10.14 Mojave
• macOS 10.13 High Sierra
• macOS 10.12 Sierra
• OS X 10.11 El Capitan
• OS X 10.10 Yosemite

The download link is always located in point #4 on each of these pages linked above. The High Sierra through Catalina links are not to a .DMG download. It's the full installer app of each from the Mac App Store.

 

[Asural]

If you sign in at "Apple Menu-> App Store ..." and it is in the "Purchased" list, you can download the existing installer.

If you click the X mark on the left of the download, it will be erased from the purchase history and you will not be able to download it. Please do not click without imitating my failure.

 

[marjiea1]

I sucessfully installed from a Snow Leopard disc using the Legacy 10.6 guide (iBoot + MultiBeast) onto my Asus P7P55D Pro (but using the GT520 card from my HP Sandy Bridge machine.)

Once in Snow Leopard, these installers wouldn't work in Unibeast for me. I kept getting the "incomplete" message no matter which version I tried, even following all the methods to clean all traces of the old ones off and download again. (I tried different versions in El Capitan, High Sierra and Mojave in VirtualBox on my Catalina Mac Mini and Unibeast said my downloads were incomplete every time there too so I think it's a Unibeast issue.)

The createinstallmedia command doesn't work in Snow Leopard, you must have Lion or later to use it so I had to use the disk utility restore method to create a bootable USB installer. I followed the guide at MacWorld for "How to make a bootable OS X 10.10 Yosemite install drive" option 3 using Terminal.

While I could boot successfully from Clover on the USB to install an upgraded OS (on a different drive than I have Snow Leopard installed on) I couldn't boot my new install hard drive from Clover so I used the Yosemite MultiBeast and let it install Chimera 4.1.0 boot loader instead and I'm happy to say I can now successfully boot from the Yosemite drive without a CD or USB. Whew, a lot of work to get here!

I am hoping I can learn Clover to be able to upgrade to El Capitan or High Sierra next and then install my 730 (that is the Keppler one needing web drivers.) Wish me luck!

 

[trs96]

my Catalina Mac Mini and Unibeast said my downloads were incomplete every time there too so I think it's a Unibeast issue.)

If you read the Unibeast notes (#3) they state that it's not going to work in a Virtual environment. Why didn't you just use Catalina on bare metal to make the UB installer ?

3. UniBeast is not supported when running within a VM. Use your native OS X installation instead.

 

[marjiea1]

After I figured out how to open the dmg file and get the app out to manually move it into my applications folder since Unibeast requires it to be there and El Capitan app doesn't install on Catalina (this version cannot be installed on this computer), Unibeast said it was incomplete there too.

 

[trs96]

The createinstallmedia command doesn't work in Snow Leopard, you must have Lion or later to use it so I had to use the disk utility restore method to create a bootable USB installer. I followed the guide at MacWorld for "How to make a bootable OS X 10.10 Yosemite install drive" option 3 using Terminal.

Did you partition the USB for Yosemite as MBR or GUID ?

Once you made the Yosemite installer how did you make that drive bootable ? Install Clover to it ?
Which version ? Any specific kexts ?

 

[marjiea1]

Did you partition the USB for Yosemite as MBR or GUID ?

Once you made the Yosemite installer how did you make that drive bootable ? Install Clover to it ?
Which version ? Any specific kexts ?

I partitioned the USB as GUID. I installed Chimera (from downloads here, version 4.1.0) to make it boot. I didn't need any kexts except FakeSMC. Even my network card worked when using Chimera.

Once I had my drive up and running, booting from disk with Chimera, then I made another install of Yosemite on a second drive so I could still boot up into a working version while I played with installing Clover on the main drive. When I used Clover I had to also use more kexts, FakeSMC, network driver kext, audio kext, and power management kext. Clover was a major learning curve for me. I made changes with Clover Configurator (I started with the legacy version at first) and then checked the config file with a text editor to make sure I understood the code itself and that helped when I wanted to manually configure things later. With Clover installed my OS was plain Vanilla so I started to update like a real Mac from the dowloaded version apps. When I was ready to update my second drive I made USB installers and performed clean installs just to have the experience.

At some point I moved Clover to the EFI partition (which I had to format as MBR before it would install - reading the instructions on the option in Clover helped me even though I had to go Google how to do what they said.) I used Multibeast to get El Capitan working without a DSDT (no premade available for my bios version).

Upgrading from El Capitan I needed more kexts and kernel patches. I was fortunate to find a post where someone with my motherboard shared their clover config which had the kernel patches specific to my board.

When I had to get a higher hardware ID to install Sierra or High Sierra (sorry I forgot which now) I was happy I had not signed into my AppleID on any of the previous OS versions so changing my hardware type and getting a new serial number to match was not too hard. There were kext changes again and the older Nvidia graphic card wasn't working out of box so I moved into the newer Nvidia card I had that was well documented in the Forums here, including that I would need to use web drivers and the forums showed boot options to use them.

As I moved into High Sierra I needed different options to turn the web drivers on. I used the Benjamin Dobell script when High Sierra did a major update to the same version but the latest drivers wouldn't install again. The script actually knew they needed to be modified and asked if I wanted it to do that? Yes, of course and it worked great (better than the Nvidia Driver Manager itself.) I 'updated' my Cuda driver when it was said to not work on the "new" version, just reinstalled the latest Cuda driver and it was accepted. I am holding at High Sierra since Nvidia cards aren't supported in Mojave and I'm not willing to spend more money on this old box. Also my sound is not supported in High Sierra and I have not invested in a USB sound system but I have a profound hearing loss (deaf) and all my movies are captioned so I, personally, am not missing anything, YMMV.

Boot options: With Nvidia graphic cards I always had to use PCIRootUID=1 to show I had a discrete card or it just wouldn't boot. I used GraphicsEnabler=Yes for my GT520. Installing using -v option, verbose (not graphic) still required a lot of patience, there were times when I thought it hung but no, it moved on just about the time I was ready to give up. When I got can't find kernel error, I used the /System/Library/Kernels/Kernel boot option. I messed up reboots so much, I got to where if an "Install OS X from" 'hard drive' showed up in Clover I booted back into it until installer on the hard drive was no longer a choice. Once or twice I had to run the install using -x -f also. Each time I got the next OS installed and working I also updated in place the second drive and I needed it because I had to wipe the other drive and reinstall a couple of times. Although I have a real Mac running Catalina, it was helpful to be able to make changes inside the same box and have a lower version to be able to get the app installers to run. I had to hook up my Windows drive once to edit the Mac EFI partition because I accidentally told Clover to hide all OS X entries (oops) when I just wanted to stop showing recovery partitions and windows data drives. Otherwise I kept my windows boot and data drives unplugged at all times and thus managed not to wipe them. When I was done and plugged all my drives in, Clover picked the windows boot drive up easily and I can now dual boot Win10 and High Sierra on different drives by just setting my bios to boot from the Clover disk first. I also set up auto boot High Sierra after 5 seconds of no interaction, so press space bar or arrow key if I want to boot into Windows instead.

I've made a High Sierra USB boot disk for backup reinstall if needed. Once I get to working on this I expect that I'll run into some trouble somewhere. I've attached a copy of my Clover Config for P7P55D Pro board and Nvidia graphics card that requires web driver for High Sierra. People will have to put their own identifying information in the places indicated (that are commented out, remove the comment marks <-- --> to make those active again.)