"Why Does the Mojave Installer Fail on my Old Mac Pro with the Message 'The Installer Resources Were Not Found'?"

When it comes to new versions of MacOS, I'm not exactly an early adopter. In fact, I usually wait about nine months before daring to move over. That's usually how long it takes for all the bugs to get worked out of the MacOS version and all the software that's going to be updated for it.

For Mojave, though, I wanted at least a sneak peak, because I wanted to see if my 2010 Mac Pro and aging software could weather the transition at all, or whether I was stuck at High Sierra. So, I installed Mojave on a test partition when it first came out of beta, and after playing with it enough to allay my fears, I forgot about it.

Until recently, when I tried to update it for more testing. Then I found I couldn't. The installer kept failing with the message, "MacOS could not be installed on your computer. The installer resources were not found." So, one of the Mojave updates beween 10.14 and 10.14.4 had a bug in the installer, because someone at Apple wasn't paying attention to old Mac Pros.

I still don't know the exact problem, but I did manage to work around it, with the help of a clue buried in the forum at www.tonymacx86.com. It really wasn't that hard: I just slid out all the drives in my Mac Pro except the one with my startup volume on it. Then the installer was able to find its resources just fine. (It may have helped that my startup volume was on an Apple SSD that was sold for my Mac Pro.)

And here's a bonus solution that I would have tried next: Copy your startup volume to a MacBook, update it there, and copy it back over. Again, the problem is only with Apple's installer, not with Mojave. As long as you have a graphics card with Metal (as I do), Mojave seems to run just fine on a 2010 Mac Pro.

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