Need Help In Terminal - Trying to Revert Back to Mojave

[mtwaller]

Hello All,

I have never tried to do any of this before (I'm a new Mac user), and I'm not the most tech-savvy, so please bear with me if I'm looking at this all totally incorrectly or something I say doesn't make sense. Disclaimer now out of the way...

I'm attempting to get my OS back to Mojave, from Catalina. Catalina is so slow that my screen saver won't even run without constantly freezing up. I've researched the process online, and I've gotten a small way through the process and then I hit a wall.

I have macOS Mojave Installer downloaded in my Applications folder. I've wiped and formatted a thumb drive (titled "NO NAME"). Now, when I'm attempting to make the thumb drive bootable, I cannot proceed. Below is what I enter into the terminal:


sudo /Applications/Install macOSMojave.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia -volume/Volumes/NO NAME

Once entered, I am prompted for my admin password. Once the password is entered correctly, the following comes back:


sudo: /Applications/Install: command not found

Can anyone possibly advise me what I'm doing wrong, or if there is a workaround to proceed in this process? Catalina makes me want to jump off a bridge. Thanks for your help!

-Michael

 

[Lufbrarunner]

When I have used an installer in the past I used the following:
sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Mojave.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia -volume /Volumes/NO NAME

 

[mtwaller]

@Lufbrarunner I appreciate your response, I copied and pasted your suggestion directly into Terminal with no luck. I did, however, get a new error message:


olume is not a valid volume mount point.

That's verbatim what it says. Any thoughts?

 

[Lufbrarunner]

Is you thumb drive formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) with a partition scheme set to GUID?

 

[Harry Trent]

Are you sure the image you created the installer from is a full version of the OS and not just an update?

 

[37Shannon]

Hello All,

I have never tried to do any of this before (I'm a new Mac user), and I'm not the most tech-savvy, so please bear with me if I'm looking at this all totally incorrectly or something I say doesn't make sense. Disclaimer now out of the way...

I'm attempting to get my OS back to Mojave, from Catalina. Catalina is so slow that my screen saver won't even run without constantly freezing up. I've researched the process online, and I've gotten a small way through the process and then I hit a wall.

I have macOS Mojave Installer downloaded in my Applications folder. I've wiped and formatted a thumb drive (titled "NO NAME"). Now, when I'm attempting to make the thumb drive bootable, I cannot proceed. Below is what I enter into the terminal:


sudo /Applications/Install macOSMojave.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia -volume/Volumes/NO NAME

Once entered, I am prompted for my admin password. Once the password is entered correctly, the following comes back:


sudo: /Applications/Install: command not found

Can anyone possibly advise me what I'm doing wrong, or if there is a workaround to proceed in this process? Catalina makes me want to jump off a bridge. Thanks for your help!

-Michael

After you get yourself straightened out, go out and get an external hard disk. They're cheap enough nowadays that everyone should be able to afford one. For example, I found a Seagate One Touch 2TB External Hard Drive Slim Portable HDD USB 3.0 / USB 2.0 at Stapes for $63.

Plug in your external disk, and use Disk Utility to create two or three Mac OS Extended (Journaled) partitions using the GUID scheme.

Next, get a copy of SuperDuper or CarbonCopy (around $25-30) and clone your hard drive to one of these partitions. That gives you a bootable backup for your Mojave system.

Now you're ready to do a clean install of Catalina. Run the InstallCatalina.app file, point it to one of your empty partitions on your external hard drive, and install it. You'll probably find, as I did, that Catalina on a clean install runs pretty good, even from an external disk, whereas Catalina installed as an upgrade is, to put it politely, terrible, horrible, evil, nasty and rotten. I inadvertently did an upgrade to Catalina from El Capitan because I thought it would give me a clean-install option like earlier installers used to do, but it didn't, and I wound up with a system that would barely run. So I restored my El Cap system (which I was able to do because I bought an external hard drive and SuperDuped my El Cap hard disk to it), and then restarted the Catalina install to a blank partition on the external drive. Made a world of difference; Catalina runs pretty well, considering it's running from an external hard disk connected to my Mac mini via USB2.

This allows you to work on customizing Catalina at your leisure while still allowing you to boot up into your Mojave system on your internal hard disk for day-to-day activities.

 

[Harry Trent]

I believe CarbonCopy is free to use for 30 days or something like that. So you may not have to purchase it.

 

[Lufbrarunner]

SuperDuper is also free to use, you only need to pay if you need some extra features like scheduled copying etc.