In other words, you don’t have a downloadable version of the installer unless you happened to purchase Lion for another, older Mac. But if you have a Mac that debuted after Lion (any Mac from July 2011 or later), your Mac shipped with Lion pre-installed. (Lion Internet Recovery is available on mid-2011-or-later Macs, as well as some older Macs that have receivedĮxplained how to create a bootable Lion-installer drive from the Mac App Store version of Lion. And if you’ve got a Mac that doesn’t support Lion Internet Recovery-a version of Lion Recovery based on special firmware-recovery mode may not even be available if your Mac’s drive itself is having problems, whereas a bootable install drive will always be there for you. For starters, Lion Recovery doesn’t include the full Lion installer-it requires you to download nearly 4GB of data before you can reinstall Lion-whereas a bootable installer drive contains the entire Lion installer, making installation much, much faster. For example, if you want to install Lion on multiple Macs, a bootable installer drive can be more convenient than downloading or copying the entire Lion installer to each computer.īut even for troubleshooting, a bootable installer drive has advantages over Lion Recovery. But as IĮxplained when Lion debuted, there are still good reasons to have a bootable installer disc or drive. Now your older OS installer thumb drives will work! Just remember to re-set the Date back to the correct year and set it back to auto.It’s a convenient feature that, in theory, means you no longer have to carry a Mac OS X Install disc or a bootable external hard drive. The trick is back dating the systems clock! Alter the Date & Time setting from auto set to manual and then alter the date to a year that is within the given OS’s release window. Not to fear! You can still install the OS. Some Internet recovery images likewise have not been updated. In all of these just jump down to Step 4 to get to the URL link for the OS image.Īpple did not alter the older images in their downloads.

The issue you face with the newer macOS’s is Apple didn’t update the certificate which is why this has become more of an issue as of late. As an example I had to re-install Lion for someone as they just didn’t want anything newer (90 year old lady) who just didn’t want to relearn how to do things or have the will to update her apps. You’re hitting an expired certificate issue! Here’s more on it If you've got an old macOS install image, it will probably stop working todayĪpple has been doing this for years! You mostly on hit this issue on systems which can’t support newer OS’s.

Mac os x lion installer