Mac Could Not Create A Preboot Volume For Apfs Install
(I do not own external HD nor any other thumb drives, once you get to this point you can't create a thumb drive bootable volume because I tried the initial stages of getting the (TERMINAL) codes for that process off the Apple Support site and upon running the script, it too failed). How to Fix Could Not Create a Preboot Volume for APFS install Error. If the issue is with your Computer or a Laptop you should try using Reimage Plus which can scan the repositories and replace corrupt and missing files. This works in most cases, where the issue is originated due to a system corruption.
| When attempting to reinstall the OSX high sierra but continued receiving 'Could not create a Preboot Volume for APFS install.' Basically stating that Preboot Execution Environment (PXE) wasn't installing on the APFS forever reason. So, this is how I resolved it without a creating a boot USB. |
| 1) Rebooting the system while holding the (command-option-r) keys until the Internet installer prompt screen appeared. |
| 2) Setup the Wifi connection |
| 3) Once a copying of the Apple utility component is installed. The system will reboot to the Mac OS utilities screen. |
| 4) Select the disk utility, then press continue. This is where I believe issue originated from because before I was only given the option to select one of the AFPS varieties. However, with the Internet installer I'm given the ability to select from others such as Journaled and Fat32. Select the Journaled FS and then press Erase, which will delete the old content and reformat the drive. |
| 5) Once that's done go back out to the utilities screen and select reinstall OS and continue. This may take a while but it obviously all depends on your network speed. Nevertheless, once that's completed you will boot back into your system and be prompted to setup the basic system requirements. |
| That's all folks |
commented Aug 9, 2018
This worked for me. The key was to go into the Internet installer prompt. Thanks for sharing it here. Cheers! |
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 Diskto be main HD. - Reboot and press
Optionkey 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.