Unable to build the Catalina image.

[londbell]

Env: Mac mini 2018 with macOS Catalina

Scripts Path: /Users/Shared/dmg/installinstallmacos.py

Here is my error log.

Choose a product to download (1-41): 31

Downloading http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/26/37/001-68446/r1dbqtmf3mtpikjnd04cq31p4jk91dceh8/InstallESDDmg.chunklist...
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 26896  100 26896    0     0   171k      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--  171k

Downloading http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/26/37/001-68446/r1dbqtmf3mtpikjnd04cq31p4jk91dceh8/BaseSystem.chunklist...
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  2020  100  2020    0     0  16694      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 16694

Downloading http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/26/37/001-68446/r1dbqtmf3mtpikjnd04cq31p4jk91dceh8/InstallESDDmg.pkg...
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 7379M  100 7379M    0     0  6621k      0  0:19:01  0:19:01 --:--:-- 7288k

Downloading https://swdist.apple.com/content/downloads/26/37/001-68446/r1dbqtmf3mtpikjnd04cq31p4jk91dceh8/InstallESDDmg.pkm...

Downloading http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/26/37/001-68446/r1dbqtmf3mtpikjnd04cq31p4jk91dceh8/MajorOSInfo.pkg...
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 1860k  100 1860k    0     0  2328k      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 2325k

Downloading https://swdist.apple.com/content/downloads/26/37/001-68446/r1dbqtmf3mtpikjnd04cq31p4jk91dceh8/MajorOSInfo.pkm...

Downloading http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/26/37/001-68446/r1dbqtmf3mtpikjnd04cq31p4jk91dceh8/OSInstall.mpkg...
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  780k  100  780k    0     0  2913k      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 2902k

Downloading http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/26/37/001-68446/r1dbqtmf3mtpikjnd04cq31p4jk91dceh8/InstallAssistantAuto.pkg...
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 10.2M  100 10.2M    0     0  7505k      0  0:00:01  0:00:01 --:--:-- 7505k

Downloading https://swdist.apple.com/content/downloads/26/37/001-68446/r1dbqtmf3mtpikjnd04cq31p4jk91dceh8/InstallAssistantAuto.pkm...

Downloading http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/26/37/001-68446/r1dbqtmf3mtpikjnd04cq31p4jk91dceh8/InstallInfo.plist...
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  1584  100  1584    0     0  25548      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 25548

Downloading http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/26/37/001-68446/r1dbqtmf3mtpikjnd04cq31p4jk91dceh8/AppleDiagnostics.dmg...
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 3073k  100 3073k    0     0  4269k      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 4263k

Downloading http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/26/37/001-68446/r1dbqtmf3mtpikjnd04cq31p4jk91dceh8/AppleDiagnostics.chunklist...
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100   328  100   328    0     0   5290      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--  5290

Downloading http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/26/37/001-68446/r1dbqtmf3mtpikjnd04cq31p4jk91dceh8/RecoveryHDMetaDmg.pkg...
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  477M  100  477M    0     0  8947k      0  0:00:54  0:00:54 --:--:-- 6912k

Downloading https://swdist.apple.com/content/downloads/26/37/001-68446/r1dbqtmf3mtpikjnd04cq31p4jk91dceh8/RecoveryHDMetaDmg.pkm...

Downloading http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/26/37/001-68446/r1dbqtmf3mtpikjnd04cq31p4jk91dceh8/BaseSystem.dmg...
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  475M  100  475M    0     0  7476k      0  0:01:05  0:01:05 --:--:-- 11.2M

Making empty sparseimage...
installer: Error - the package path specified was invalid: './content/downloads/26/37/001-68446/r1dbqtmf3mtpikjnd04cq31p4jk91dceh8/InstallAssistant.pkg'.
Command '[u'/usr/sbin/installer', u'-pkg', u'./content/downloads/26/37/001-68446/r1dbqtmf3mtpikjnd04cq31p4jk91dceh8/InstallAssistant.pkg', u'-target', '/private/tmp/dmg.dXR5vF']' returned non-zero exit status 1

I tried three times, and each time it failed. Whenever it failed, I would delete the old download and re-download it, but I kept getting the same error.

After researching, I found that content/downloads/26/37/001-68446/r1dbqtmf3mtpikjnd04cq31p4jk91dceh8/InstallAssistant.pkg does not exist. Instead, it's content/downloads/26/37/001-68446/r1dbqtmf3mtpikjnd04cq31p4jk91dceh8/InstallAssistantAuto.pkg. The download logs also don't mention downloading InstallAssistant.pkg.

In the script, I noticed that it uses InstallAssistant.pkg, which appears to be intended for newer versions of macOS. The Catalina installer package doesn't seem to include this file.

Indeed, http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/26/37/001-68446/r1dbqtmf3mtpikjnd04cq31p4jk91dceh8/InstallAssistant.pkg does not exist. Accessing it will trigger a 404 error.

Furthermore, according to https://gist.github.com/nuomi1/16133b89c2b38b7eb197, InstallAssistant.pkg only became available starting from macOS Big Sur.

So, is this an issue with the script? It seems unable to handle Catalina.

[grahampugh]

The change to use InstallAssistant was made due to a breaking change Apple made with the pkgutil command in macOS 15.6.

You should be able to go back to the previous commit of this script for use on old OSs like macOS 10.15 Catalina.

[gregneagle]

The strategy to build the Installer app in a disk image changed with the release of macOS 15.6 (Apple changed how the Installer worked). The change needed to adapt to macOS 15.6 and later seems to have broken the build process for Catalina and earlier. It's probably possible to fix this, but has Apple hasn't released new versions of Catalina in over four years, this seems pretty low-priority...

[gregneagle]

A quick test of trying to use InstallAssistantAuto.pkg fails:

Making empty sparseimage...
installer: Package name is InstallAssistantAuto
installer: Installing at base path /private/tmp/dmg.1h1Xfp
installer: The install failed..
Command '['/usr/sbin/installer', '-pkg', './content/downloads/26/37/001-68446/r1dbqtmf3mtpikjnd04cq31p4jk91dceh8/InstallAssistantAuto.pkg', '-target', '/private/tmp/dmg.1h1Xfp']' returned non-zero exit status 1.
Product installation failed.

I'm not super motivated to work on getting this to work with an OS that hasn't been updated in over four years. (I already have archived installers for Catalina.) As Graham mentioned above, you could use an earlier version of the script on macOS < 15.6 to build a disk image with a Catalina installer.

[ubihazard]

The issue is not Catalina's installer, even /usr/sbin/installer from High Sierra is capable of making macOS install images. The issue is precisely lack of InstallAssistant.pkg so the new installer command introduced with mentioned workaround won't work for making images of legacy, pre-Big Sur OSes.

Relevant commit is 522fc7f. If you simply uncomment the change and revert to old /usr/sbin/installer command variant Catalina installer would build without issue:

os.environ["CM_BUILD"] = "CM_BUILD"
cmd = ['/usr/sbin/installer', '-pkg', dist_path, '-target', target_vol]
# a hack to work around a change in macOS 15.6+ since installing a .dist
# file no longer works
#dist_dir = os.path.dirname(dist_path)
#install_asst_pkg = os.path.join(dist_dir, "InstallAssistant.pkg")
#cmd = ['/usr/sbin/installer', '-pkg', install_asst_pkg, '-target', target_vol]

[ubihazard]

Pull request restores the old installer command when building installer image for legacy macOS. I chose to handle them based just on title property since there are only three of them: High Sierra, Mojave, and Catalina. This makes detection code simpler rather than doing numeric version comparisons.

Tested on High Sierra successfully building installer images for Mojave, Big Sur, and Ventura.

[gregneagle]

I haven’t tested this yet, but I’m fairly certain this will fail when run on macOS 15.6 and later.

[ubihazard]

Probably. In that case, an additional check is needed if running the script on 15.6+. You can easily implement it. I can't test on 15.6 yet (don't have it).

[ubihazard]

Added the check because there's handy platform.mac_ver().

[sulliops]

Leaving a note here for future maintainers:

I stumbled across a couple of workarounds to build installers for High Sierra through Catalina on hosts running macOS 15.6 and later. The first is from a post on the InsanelyMac forum, and the second is from Luming Yin's installer index page.

I implemented the first method in ninxsoft/Mist#232, as Mist is my personal preference for building macOS installers, but the method could very easily be ported to installinstallmacos.py. The second method is a bit more involved (it requires setting shell environment variables), but it could also work.

I don't plan to submit a PR for this project, but I think it'd be useful if someone did. Cheers!

[gregneagle]

I pretty much only use this tool to download current releases of macOS and build disk images containing the Install macOS app; I already have copies of older macOS releases archived.

While it's nice to be able to build older releases, I don't really have the time, energy, or motivation to continually test all the older releases still available on the softwareupdate feed with the tool running under each new release of macOS. If someone wants to do that work, that would be nice!