Need help with PRE High Sierra installer for friend. 10.12.6

[toodamnhip]

I am setting up a buddies studio, flying out, etc. Lot’s of effort.
But unexpectedly, his new trashcan Mac came with HIGH Sierra installed.
This means his 2nd Vienna Pro computer won’t be able to run VE PRO until HIGH Sierra bugs are fixed by apple or whomever.

Thus, I need a plain old “Sierra”, 10.12.6 installer to send to him.

Anyone know where I can get one, or, anyone have one?

Thanks Dave

[mikehalloran]

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208202

You will need to make a Sierra installer. The Terminal instructions work fine.

https://lifehacker.com/how-to-make-a-bo ... 1786853248

Use an old 8G USB drive if you can find one. Some new thumb drives do not work as I found out when I bought a 12G PNY from BestBuy the other day. Fortunately, a 64G I had did work.

The only way you’ll know if successful is to try to boot with it when done. Shut down your Mac, insert the USB stick and Option Boot. Select the install drive and see what happens. If it boots the Mac, it will work—the non-compatible ones don’t get that far.

Now try to boot th Mac Pro the same way. Once it boots from the installer, you have to go into Disk Utility and reformat th drive. Only then can you install the OS from the tumb drive.

All this assumes that Apple hasn’t done anything in the firmware to keep the install from happening.

[toodamnhip]

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208202

Good ol’ Mike to the rescue.
Why didn’t I just pm you, I should have known..lol
Muchas gracias....

D

[mikehalloran]

I edited my post with instructions. It’s not as simple as running the installer.

[mikehalloran]

There’s a possibility that the Sierra Disk Utility will not be able to see the Mac Pro’s drive. This is because of APFS. Let’s hope you get lucky in this regard. It would take me a couple of hours just to set up the test.

If this happens, you’ll need to boot into High Sierra on the MP and, through a combination of Disk Utility and Terminal, create a non-APFS partition that the Sierra version of Disk Utility can see. When it sees a partition, it can see the parent and reformat the entire drive. It’s complex and convoluted—I googled and had three web sites with conflicting instructions open till I hit the magic combination that worked. I cannot tell you exactly how I accomplished it—only that I did.

The UAD plugs work if you disable VSTs in the Preferences for DP 9.51. There are a couple of threads on this.