High Sierra Install Failed - Boot Options Missing Mac HD

PhantomPower
New Contributor

I've got a mid-2011 MacBook Air here running El Capitan and I was trying to install High Sierra that I downloaded from the App Store that same day. (I verified High Sierra is the latest OS this computer can run.)

  • The installation runs for about 4 minutes and fails with message: "MacOS could not be installed on your computer. File system verify or repair failed".

  • At this point, I just want to restart and get back to El Capitan and figure things out from there. When I chose to restart, I had no boot disk to choose from. It was blank.

  • So I shutdown and hold down Option.
  • Turns out the only option is the MacOS Installer.
  • I reset the NVRAM/PRAM. Still no drive.
  • So if I keep rebooting, it will continuously boot to the installer and show the same error.
  • I boot into Recovery mode (Command+R) and In Disk Utilities, the drive looks fine. (See screenshot)
  • When in this mode, I do finally see the Macintosh HD in the Startup Disk. (See screenshot). It's showing that OS X 10.11.6 is there and I supposedly can boot to it.
  • But guess what, when I restart with that selected, I get right back to the High Sierra OS install AGAIN. Just can't get back into El Capitan.
  • When I use terminal, I can see the users files are all still intact. I can offload those onto USB if I want. It seems like the drive is fine.

I saw this Discussion, and tried to delete the "/Volumes/Macintosh HD/macos Install Data/" after "csrutil disable", but it said it was read only:
https://www.jamf.com/jamf-nation/discussions/26988/macos-high-sierra-installer-attempting-to-run-after-successful-install

-On my latest boot into the installer there's a new error message saying "The installer resources have expired".

I don't need to install High Sierra anymore, it's alright. I just need to get back into El Capitan.

So...why can't I boot back into El Capitan? What's going on?

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