How To Fix “This Copy of the Install OS X… Can’t Be Verified”

I tried Installing an old version of Mavericks on my Macbook Pro and ran into this silly error message.

“This copy of the Install OS X Mavericks application can’t be verified. It may have been corrupted or tampered with during downloading.”

That was the end of my Mavericky aspirations… Or was it?….

If you’ve been treated with a similar message when trying to install an older version of MacOS, you may be facing some kind of image corruption or 3rd party tampering as the error states. And we all know… Apple Don’t Play That! So no passing go for you, Bruh. Sorry…

If this happens, you may have to try re-downloading the image and/or re-writing the OS to the media device you are using. It could have been corrupted during download or when the media was being created. If the issue persists after a successful 2^nd download and re-write, try another source all together.  This is just standard practice. But before you waste a lot of time, bandwidth and storage space, consider this…

“This copy of the Install OS X Mavericks application can’t be verified. It may have been corrupted or tampered with during downloading.”

This error message is quite generic and vague, as many computer error messages are. It’s like developers just find 80 problems, potential issues and discrepencies, and just stuff them all behind a single message. Even if the error message has literally nothing to do with the causing issue!

This is exactly the case with this install error message. There are many reasons you could see such a message but one of the most common reasons is a simple date issue! Maybe Apple doesn’t want us installing older versions of their OS as opposed to updating to the latest, greatest version every year on release day at 12:00 a.m. on the dot. Some sort of “expiration” date is built into each OS release that is checked against the current date of your machine during installation. If your system date is after the expiration, you will get such an error.

So how do we fix it?

What we can do is temporarily change the date of our system to a date that works for the corresponding OS. We’ll restore it to the correct date and time later, after the installation is successful.

Here’s how it’s done.

1: Boot your USB or DVD containing the MacOS installer.

2: Choose your language and continue.

3: From the default screen click utilities in the menu bar.

4: Select terminal.

*** Using this command, you must enter the desired date as Month/Day/Time/Year using a single string of numbers.

So June 7^th 1982 at 3:47 p.m. will read like so:

060715471982

5: In Terminal type ‘date’, then a space, then the appropriate date that matches the OS to be installed.

Example: date 060715471982

*** Choose the correct date from the list below.

1. 1. 1. 1. 1. Lion: 102613152011
            2. Mountain Lion: 102613152012
            3. Mavericks: 102613152013
            4. Yosemite: 102613152014
            5. El Capitan: 102613152015

6: Press Enter.

*** If done correctly, the new changes will take effect immediately. Terminal will show the new date as a result.

7: Close Terminal.

8: Proceed with your installation using the non-corrupted, non-tampered with Mac OS X image.

If this “hack” does not stop the error message in question, your issue could be god only knows what else. I’ll have to put another article together for ya!

Let Me Know!

In The Meantime, TAKE CARE. 🙂