OS X Installer is Damaged

[Adam – RealMacMods]

Ive noticed more than a few emails about this issue so i thought i would make post about it.

It is becoming more and more common that OS X installations are reporting that USB Installer is damaged. This error is wrong and misleading.

Although a truly corrupt installer is possible, but I’ve never seen it.

The real answer is far more simple. It all comes down to the system time. When you boot into the installer and it notices that your time is set 1974 (or whatever) it knows something is wrong and pulls the plug on the installation. This time discrepancy will always happen when you remove the battery (as is recommended for almost any hardware repair).

There is a lesser seen issue wherein there is a window of time that cannot be exceeded between the installation date and the date the installer was created. If you created your installer more than a few months ago, download and make it again. It’s just good practice all around to install a reasonably recent release.

Ok so thats the problem, what do we do?

First off confirm your date is incorrect.
Open a terminal from the Utilities menu and type
date

It will show the current date as it believes it to be.

Next step is to get the date correct. The easiest way to do this is to connect to WiFi (or ethernet if available) within the installer and update via the Apple NTP servers.
Run this command from a terminal and you will be good to go.
ntpdate -u time.apple.com
date

If some reason this doesn’t work (or you don’t have an internet connection), you can manually set the date via the terminal.
this can be done by typing
date 1101120017

This would set the date to November (11) 1st(01), 12:00(1200), 2017(17)

Set your date accordingly and try the installation again.

-Adam

• This topic was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by Adam - RealMacMods.
• This topic was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by Adam - RealMacMods.

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