Failed to create a bootable disk image file for this version of macOS.

Hello all,

Any ideas on why I keep getting this message? I am running out of ideas and cannot get any answers from support.
I had to rebuilt my mac system from scratch and reinstalled + re-added the license. I am on macOS Monterey 12.01 and trying to create a new Big Sur instance on 11.6.1. The .app installer is sitting in /Applications and I've downloaded directly from Apple, so I can confirm that it is clean. Yet, I am still getting this error within the Installation Assistant right after I select the .app and click Continue.

Any ideas would be very helpful on how to resolve.

Thank you!

 

Stuck in same boat. Did you ever figure this out?

 

I had the same issue. In my case, the error occurred when trying to directly create a macOS VM whose OS version is not natively supported on my physical underlying Mac hardware. For example trying to directly create/install macOS Monterey on a Mac Pro 2010 produced this error.'

I figured out I could instead first (1) Create a macOS VM using the last version natively supported by the underlying hardware then (2) upgrade the OS within the VM thereafter. Using the same example, first created a macOS Mojave VM, then upgraded the OS within the VM to Monterey 12.3.1.

 

Additional note about this in-place OS upgrade process. From my experience, upgrading the VM from macOS Mojave to Monterey went fine, but at one point during the upgrade it displayed an icon of a circle with a slash going through it with a link about macOS startup. But after some time it rebooted and continued the upgrade process. My suspicion was that page was related to attempted firmware upgrades which weren't needed.