The Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks download script is now hosted on Mavericks Forever. To download Mavericks, open a Terminal on any Mac and run:
curl mavericksforever.com/get.sh | sh
Or, navigate directly to mavericksforever.com/get.sh to read what the script does.
Please update this script. Unfortunately, I tried to restore the Mavericks installer using the restore command script to a specific drive partition. It erased the entire drive, I lost a lot of important files.
Oh no, I'm so sorry you lost data!
The USB creation script does need to repartition the entire disk in order to ensure a GUID Partition Table. I've updated the warning message to make this more explicit:
WARNING: Everything on the disk containing $target_volname will be erased. Continue? (yes/no)
The entire reason this part of the script exists is because I kept getting emails from people who ran into trouble doing the restore manually via Disk Utility. Most of these users have no idea what a partition is, or that a disk can have more than one. I do still recommend using Disk Utility for more complex disk layouts.
It's really tricky to come up with phrasing that will accurately inform a more technical user without confusing a less-technical one. Even with the current phrasing, I'm worried some people will think that their entire computer will be erased or something.
A bit late to the party, I just stumbled upon this thread.
I have a working installer for 10.9.0, and from there you can update to 10.9.5. I used to be a tech and I keep an installer of every MacOS version since 10.6 on a hard drive in case I need to reinstall stuff offline, and also because I don't trust online repositories to be available forever. Looks like I was right about that for Mavericks. I also have working images of 10.9 and 10.11 modified for 32bit to run on the 1st gen Mac Pro.
Happy to share if anybody needs it.
Hi @Wowfunhappy,
I've been searching all over for a Mavericks install image of some kind, so luckily I also stumbled upon this thread of yours. I've successfully downloaded and created a bootable USB drive on my Mac mini (M2) using your install script.
I needed it to install on a MacBook Pro (mid 2009 unibody), which was successful without a problem!
Thanx a million for this!
The trick that worked for me was to first set the date back to somewhere in 2009, to circumvent the expired certificate problem (just in case ;-).
Cheers,
John.
@CadBear Hi! The goal of this project was explicitly to download Mavericks from Apple’s servers! That said, I actually don’t think we have a publicly accessible copy of the original 10.9.0 (as opposed to the updated 10.9.5), if you would be willing to put that up on the Internet Archive and/or Macintosh Garden it would be a great resource to have.
@SumSera You’re welcome! Just so you know, you do not need to change the date, it shouldn’t harm anything but it’s completely unnecessary.
Hi Jonathan,
Thanks for the feedback , it was just a fun experiment and I learnt a lot from doing it.
Nice to know it’s been tried before and not just me being hopeless. 😆
Just as a side note , did you know that the certificate issues don’t just effect mavericks , if you download an installer from an old version of the AppStore , the InstallESD.dmg still can’t be opened. Not such a problem as we have links to download everything else , just a curious side note.
Thanks again for your brilliant work.
sixx