I have Mavericks; can I still download Mavericks?

[halemano]

Aloha from Maui, first thread; Mahalo for your help

I have a 'Snow Leopard / iLife 11 / iWork 09' family pack, and was hoping to clean install all my 'family' to Mavericks. One reason to not go Yosemite is my Adobe CS 5.5, which will go on the two newest rigs.

Looking at my App Store purchases tab, I see; Keynote, Numbers, Pages, OS X Mavericks, all dated Oct. 9. The 'buttons' for Keynote, Number and Pages says 'update' - I got carried away and hit the 'button' for Mavericks before noticing if it also said 'update'. I paused after only 2.3 MB of 5.33 GB.

I hope to put Mavericks on my external HD, so I can clean install Mavericks on all 4 computers. My first project is the iMac, which I got off eBay, fully loaded with software, with OS on SSD, but after sitting for many months, it would not boot up. During my fussing, I ran Disk Utility, showing both the SSD and 3TB HD as OK, but could not recover, so I installed full family pack mentioned above. One annoyance is that I can not 'see' the SSD anymore?

Then, when going for OS X upgrade, only Yosemite is available

Rumor has it that I CAN download Mavericks, since it is in my App Store purchase history, right? If I resume that paused 'update', is that the Mavericks installer? I'm not interested in a Yosemite installer.

Assuming I do end up with a Mavericks installer on the Mac Pro HD, how do I install something on the external HD that allows me to install Mavericks on the other computers (and lastly the Mac Pro, fresh, clean)?

 

[tywebb13]

Yeah. You can still get it in your purchases tab if you already got it before. Just let the download complete and then follow instructions here to make a bootable usb: https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/18081307/

Then boot up the computers with the usb by holding down the option key, select the usb in startup manager and install mavericks.

 

[halemano]

Thanks for the quick reply, I will likely update my progress in this thread.

If there was a similarly educational thread about best paths for installing Adobe CS 5.5, I'd be ecstatic! I could install the Adobe suite on a fully updated Snow Leopard system, then upgrade to Mavericks, or upgrade to Mavericks first and then install the Adobe suite?

 

[DeltaMac]

Don't forget to quit the installer when it displays on your screen, don't run it at that time... Then, save a copy of the installer to an external drive, where you can always get at it to make an installer drive if you need to.
DiskmakerX is a great help to make a USB installer for Mavericks. An 8GB thumb drive is a great size for that use.

 

[halemano]

Now that my mind has wandered around this for a couple hours, I wonder; since this Mac Pro already upgraded, the download manager is already in downloads, right?

 

[tywebb13]

It doesn't go into Downloads. It goes into Applications. But if you installed it from the installer app, unfortunately it deletes itself.

 

[halemano]

Not having a usb flash handy, my first attempt was to an 8 GB SD card, formatted fresh with Disk Utility; and terminal replied - /Volumes/Untitled is not a valid mount point.

Well, I sat back and considered, then decided to open Disk Utility again, checked 'Untitled' again, erased 'Untitled' again (formatting), and ran the command again, which seems to have worked. I now see...

Erasing Disk: 0%... 10%... 20%... 100%...
Copying installer files to disk...

Too bad there is no progress bar here, have to assume it's progressing

 

[halemano]

So, the light bulb didn't go on above my cranium until late last night, and unfortunately it was too late.

My silly 8GB SD Mavericks installer only caused the iMac to chime and then hang on a gray screen. The first time it only took a couple restarts to get back to the fully updated Snow Leopard desktop. After the second hanging gray screen, I had to run Disk Utility, via the Snow Leopard disk, verifying permissions and repair permissions (but not repairing).

During all that, I realized that I could just go to the purchases tab, from each machine I am upgrading!

The iMac is installing Mavericks as I type, via the purchases tab, even though it was the Mac Pro that initially went Mavericks