Recently (Fall 2020) I was able to purchase an old MacBook Air for my daughter to use. It is an older device, but working just fine for what she wanted. The original owner had not removed his account, and I had no admin password, so I decided to just do a reinstall. Very bad move on my part.

Apple really builds good hardware, but they don't want you to keep it too long. So, after a point, they kill the SSL keys on the repository, meaning you can no longer reinstall using the built in functions.

Rebooted the system, pressed Apple-R to go into recovery mode, and told the system to reinstall itself. After formatting the drive and starting the install, I get a timer stating it is going to take -2,393,938,938 and 8 minutes. A couple of minutes later, a message appears stating it can not download additional components needed to install OS X. Basically, the same issue described at https://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/601830/re+installing+OSX+problems.

Finally got it installed. I had a friend who had a full system backup who was able to take that image and copy it to the MacBook, and it worked just fine. Then, my daughter tried to install some software which corrupted the machine, so she brought it back to me to repair.

Not being an total idiot, I had made a full TimeMachine backup before I gave the machine to my daughter, so I thought “no problem, I'll just recover from TimeMachine”. Didn't work. I made the backup to an SMB network share, and the old Mac just couldn't seem to want to use it. Various failures. So, I copied the DMG to a HPFS formatted external drive that I had purchased for her (and, forgot the ._ file the first couple of times), but it still wouldn't recover.

Finally, found http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2009041216314856 and decided to try it. Basically, boot into recovery mode, then open a Terminal.

hdid -nomount "/Volumes/Diotallevi/Clean Checkpoints/WDC Image.dmg"
diskutil list | less
dd if=/dev/disk3 of=/dev/disk2 bs=131072

The first command needs to be modified to mount your dmg. This mounts the dmg so you can actually see it. Well, doesn't mount it, but makes it available to diskutil, the next command.

When you run diskutil list | less, it will show you all the “disks” it knows about. You need to figure out what the actual drive inside the machine is (hint, probably disk0 or disk1), and what “disk” the dmg is mounted as. The | less part of it turns on a pager so you can use the up and down arrows to go through the list, use the q key to quit it.

Now, based on the information you got from there, run your dd command. 'if' means “Input File”, so if=/dev/disk? means you need to change the disk to where ever you have the dmg mounted. 'of' means “Output File” which should be the disk inside the computer. 'bs' is not necessary, but making larger makes the copy go faster. It is in bytes, and I'd suggest about 50% of installed memory.

I got a bootable system out of it, but when I tried to reboot, it wanted to finish installing the OS, and would not do it on the internal hard disk. But, I was able to install it to the external (that had the dmg on it). It reformatted that disk and is now booting on it correctly.

5 days after the attempt to reinstall, that is where I stand. More later.

• Burn DMG to USB https://www.androidphonesoft.com/resources/burn-dmg-to-usb-drive.html
• Restore a full-disk .dmg file to raw block device http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2009041216314856
• check status of dd https://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/11666/check-the-status-of-dd-in-progress-os-x
• Resize Mac HD Partition https://medium.com/@kepler.donald/how-to-resize-a-mac-hd-partition-to-utilize-the-available-free-space-c4aac79b6347
• Discussion of OSX Installation Issues https://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/601830/re+installing+OSX+problems
• Mount DMG from CLI https://osxdaily.com/2011/12/17/mount-a-dmg-from-the-command-line-in-mac-os-x/
• Restore OS from Time Machine backup https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202406
• Mac Startup Key Combinations https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201255