Want to go back to 10.8.4 (from 10.8.5)

Hi everyone,

A couple of months back or so I decided to do a complete, fresh reinstall of 10.8 on my Early 2008 Mac Pro - which I tend to do every 12-18 months or so to appease the OCD in me. I had been running 10.8.4 without any issues that I can remember but as 10.8.5 was then available (with the supplemental update) I decided that I would d/l the full 10.8.5 installer from the Mac App Store and do a complete install from that.

However, since running 10.8.5 I have been having a bad time with my Mac. It will sometimes completely freeze when shutting down and I have to hold the power button for 7 seconds to get it to eventually power off. Sometimes, it will hang after I wake it from sleep - it will wake up from sleep and the machine will respond for a minute or so and the Mac will again completely hang (the clock doesn't tick over in the menu bar, the mouse doesn't move, nothing) so again I have to hold in the power button to get it shut down. This is the most unstable Mac experience I have ever had.

I even went through the process of doing a second full, clean install of 10.8.5 to see if I had a bad install originally, but alas, no - still having the same issues.

I have done some googling and it appears that I am not alone with 10.8.5 issues so I want to go back to 10.8.4 where I didn't seem to have any issues.

However, this is where I am having problems…. I no longer have a 10.8.4 full installer as I foolishly overwrote this with the 10.8.5 version that I grabbed from the App Store.

So, what I am looking for is where to find a 10.8.4 installer. But I cannot get the 10.8.4 installer from the App Store now (not that I can see, anyways). I have found a 10.8.4 installer on UseNet but I don't really want to have to go down this route as I don't know if it is a clean, "untouched" version or not - the MD5 of the InstallESD.dmg is 016cf3572ba9649c3dfd36fa202f874d.

Does anyone know of where I can get a proper 10.8.4 installer from? If I contacted Apple directly do you think they would be able to supply me with an installer? Or from the local Apple Store if I took a print-out of my Mac App Store receipt?

If anyone is able to help, that would be really great.

All the best,

Moley

Hi everyone,

Thank you for taking the time to reply.

Unfortunately, all I have right now at my disposal is a 10.8.4. Combo Updater and a full 10.8.5 installer from the Mac App Store, so I can't do a a clean install with anything other than 10.8.5.

Thinking about it a bit more, I think I need to have a full installer of at least 10.8.3 to start with as I have a GTX 680 video card in my Mac which needs this version for drivers.

Is there any way to d/l older OS versions from the Mac App Store?

I had thought about going up to Mavericks, but during my googling, I came across people who were having the same issues with Mavericks as they were on 10.8.5 on their Mac Pros, so didn't really want to be jumping out of the frying pan in to the fire, so to speak.

Thanks again,

Moley

Hi again,

Well, I went to my local genius Bar today and took along a copy of my iTunes receipt showing my purchase of Mountain Lion.

I asked the Genius if their Techs had a full installer of 10.8.3 or 10.8.4 that they could pop on my memory stick for me to help me out, but he said that he wasn't able to do that even though they did have the dmg's as they use them for installing on Macs that come in for work.

I was surprised that I had to explain to the genius that a Mac Pro is a tower machine and not a laptop too

From now on, I am keeping the original 10.x.0 installer and then Combo updaters for every OS as I go along

Thanks again,

Moley

Hi,

Well, tried Mavericks for a day or so (fresh install), and after the first time Mavericks had gone to sleep and woken up it wa fine for a minute or so, then ***HANG*** and needed the hold-power-button-for-7-seconds malarkey. So it seems the online reports I had read regarding a 3,1 and Maverick still hold true; in my experience, at least :-(

However, as I was going through all my external backup drives (yes, believe it or not I have several) I found that ChronoSync, bless it, had moved "deleted" files into "Achived" folders and, lo-and-behold, there sat my original 10.8.3 installer image from the Mac App Store, just waiting for me…

So, I am going to wait until I have completed my end-of-the-year archive and then BAM - fresh install of 10.8.3 > 10.8.4 update and HOPEFULLY back to the stable machine I once had.

All the best,

Moley