Here's a really odd one!
One of our 2015 Macbook Air notebooks in my office crashed and became unbootable after the user clicked to do the High Sierra upgrade from Sierra on it.
I tried all sorts of things to get it working again, including both Internet Recovery and regular Recovery. Each time, it would partially install High Sierra and then stop with an error saying, "macOS could not be installed on your computer", followed by the specific error code mentioned in this message subject line.
I have another identically configured Air (8GB RAM, 512GB SSD, Core i7) that I just upgraded from Sierra to High Sierra without any problems at all, so clearly this SHOULD work!
The only thing I was finally able to do with the problem machine was installing Sierra from a USB thumb drive. As soon as I did that, all of the user's data was accessible again (nothing lost, thankfully!) and it was back to working normally.
I tried running the High Sierra upgrade again from a fresh App Store download, hoping the original issue was just something stupid like the user powering the computer off in the middle of the upgrade process. Nope! Exact same error and resulting unbootable machine.
The computer passes all the Apple hardware tests with flying colors and certainly seems fine running Sierra.
About the only oddity I finally realized is that when it was on Sierra, it looks like its filesystem was using the journaled case-sensitive version, as opposed to non case-sensitive. Could the case-sensitive volume be enough to cause this failure when it tries to convert to APFS during the High Sierrs upgrade??
One of our 2015 Macbook Air notebooks in my office crashed and became unbootable after the user clicked to do the High Sierra upgrade from Sierra on it.
I tried all sorts of things to get it working again, including both Internet Recovery and regular Recovery. Each time, it would partially install High Sierra and then stop with an error saying, "macOS could not be installed on your computer", followed by the specific error code mentioned in this message subject line.
I have another identically configured Air (8GB RAM, 512GB SSD, Core i7) that I just upgraded from Sierra to High Sierra without any problems at all, so clearly this SHOULD work!
The only thing I was finally able to do with the problem machine was installing Sierra from a USB thumb drive. As soon as I did that, all of the user's data was accessible again (nothing lost, thankfully!) and it was back to working normally.
I tried running the High Sierra upgrade again from a fresh App Store download, hoping the original issue was just something stupid like the user powering the computer off in the middle of the upgrade process. Nope! Exact same error and resulting unbootable machine.
The computer passes all the Apple hardware tests with flying colors and certainly seems fine running Sierra.
About the only oddity I finally realized is that when it was on Sierra, it looks like its filesystem was using the journaled case-sensitive version, as opposed to non case-sensitive. Could the case-sensitive volume be enough to cause this failure when it tries to convert to APFS during the High Sierrs upgrade??