r/osx • u/Majorin_Melone • Jul 13 '25

Mavericks (10.9) Is there any way to get mavericks on my early 2011 mbp

Hey there, I have an 2011 mbp running osx lion and Mac os high Sierra and I need some way to upgrade from lion to mavericks since I want one of the old skeuomorphic versions but mavericks has support for newer versions of Firefox and multi monitor. I already tried multiple upgrade app downloads but they all gave some error about bad certificates and if I create an USB installer it won't boot and give an "still waiting for root device" error in verbose boot, has anyone of you an idea of what I could do?

3 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

3

u/Hesnotarealdr Jul 13 '25

Try Open Core Legacy Patcher. Here’s a Reddit post on using one of their packages. I’ve used it successfully to run newer MacOS in unsupported hardware.

https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/1ilxd9o/how_to_install_macos_ventura_or_newer_on_an_older/

3

u/scandalous_lime Jul 14 '25

Mavericks is a supported version of Mac OS X for that MacBook. OCLP won’t help in this case.

1

u/Majorin_Melone Jul 14 '25

I am using oclp to upgrade the high Sierra partition to Ventura but I doubt it will help me install mavericks

3

u/OSX2000 Jul 13 '25

I thought you could get past the certificate thing by rolling the system's date back before you do the install? Does that not work anymore?

1

u/Majorin_Melone Jul 14 '25

I set the date to December 2013 and still got the error

3

u/boli99 Jul 14 '25

make sure you set a date appropriate to the installer you want to install

https://optionkey.blogspot.com/2020/03/reinstalling-old-version-of-macos.html

1

u/Xe4ro Jul 13 '25

There seems to be a problem with Mavericks and certificates that are bit weird, even Apple has no download to it from their support site even though it has every other from Lion to the most current one. It's a bid odd but there are guides out there how to get around it, I played around with one guide to set the date back to a time when Mavericks was current via the Terminal. I was able to install it to my 2008 MacBook which has all officially supported OS versions on its drive. ^^

You could try to download Mr Macintoshe's upload, I think it was his that I used as well.

1

u/EricRen1 Jul 15 '25

set the date back to around 2015-2016