Feb 06, 2018 Update 2017.09.25: Now that 10.13 is out this guide is obsolete. High Sierra update guide. Installing the 10.13 beta (starting the installer app from a booted 10.12 installation) to a new partition. Testing APFS filesystem and 10.13 Clover configuration. These steps are to verify a working. 'could not create a preboot volume for apfs install' Into recovery mode, cleared my HD (APFS), installing macOS High Sierra and after it's done I get the message: 'could not create a preboot volume for apfs install'.
Installation Steps
- From 10.11 or 10.12 systems, format an external hard drive with at least 500gb with 'Mac Os Extended Journaled'.
- Download High Sierra Beta and install it in the external hard drive.
- When the system reboots and finishes installation, it will boot from the external HD.Go to Preferences and change
Startup Disk
to be main HD. - Reboot and press
Option
key when the computer makes a beep and select external HD to boot from it. - Once booted again into external HD, format main HD to be APFS.
- Download High Sierra Beta from external HD booted system and install it in main HD.
- Upon restart the main HD will be clean installed with High Sierra Beta and APFS formatted.
Background
The traditional way of installing the OS image into a external flash drive does not seem to work for the time being.Here's a couple of things I tried before arriving at steps above:
My base OS was El Capitan (10.11), when you download High Sierra Beta from there, it merely downloads ~20mb.So, since you don't get the full installer right away, I decided to simply install High Sierra Beta over 10.11.This worked, so I tried to do a recovery boot, reformat the HD to APFS and then install High Sierra Beta.This didn't work. You'd get error:
At this point, I reverted back to my Time Machine backup.Looking around I found a way to create a bootable High Sierra Beta installation image. It involved trying to install it somewhere and before restarting the machine, close the installer (see forum post for reference).Following these steps I created a external bootable High Sierra Beta installation image of Beta 5.I tried to install this and it didn't work. You'd get error:
Looking at the
/var/log/install.log
I found it had these messages:After this, I decided to revert back again and use the steps above.