Why is my bootable Mojave installer not showing up on MacBook Pro 2017 during startup?

I'm about to just give up on this because i've been trying for soooo long now and not a single thing or a single solution and solved anything for me. I'm on a Macbook pro 2017 running ventura, I wanted to downgrade to Mojave to use some 32bit programs and games and because performance on Monterey and Ventura may not be optimal, and i like how it looks too. I followed every single step on the apple support page and i have had absolutely no luck, it's about to drive me insane. I formatted it correctly, Guid Partition Map, did everything correctly and EXACTLY the way it's supposed to go, it shows up as bootable in disk utility, it has the correct EFI partition aswell. I am extremely infuriated by this, can someone just help me?



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MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 13.7

Posted on Apr 16, 2025 4:45 AM

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Posted on Apr 16, 2025 5:14 AM

If your Mac supports Mojave and you followed the instructions to the letter it should work.


Some gotchas that others have stumbled on: Prepare the USB on the same Mac. Format the USB as MacOS Extended (GUID), NOT APFS (GUID), and double check that the name is the same as in the Terminal command. Re-download the full (not a tiny "stub") fresh installer. Use another good brand USB flash drive. Reset SMC and PRAM. Shutdown and use a wired keyboard to Option-boot to the USB installer.


Create a bootable installer for macOS - Apple Support


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Question marked as ⚠️ Top-ranking reply

Apr 16, 2025 5:14 AM in response to MonkeDonke69

If your Mac supports Mojave and you followed the instructions to the letter it should work.


Some gotchas that others have stumbled on: Prepare the USB on the same Mac. Format the USB as MacOS Extended (GUID), NOT APFS (GUID), and double check that the name is the same as in the Terminal command. Re-download the full (not a tiny "stub") fresh installer. Use another good brand USB flash drive. Reset SMC and PRAM. Shutdown and use a wired keyboard to Option-boot to the USB installer.


Create a bootable installer for macOS - Apple Support


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Why is my bootable Mojave installer not showing up on MacBook Pro 2017 during startup?

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