A little while ago, I encountered a very frustrating issue that had me pulling my hair out for a while. That is, until I finally stumbled upon the fix for the issue.
As a registered developer, I’ve been testing out Mavericks since Developer Preview 3, and I made it a habit of installing every release up until the GM version. The nice thing about the Mavericks betas is that you can grab the updates directly from the Mac App Store without having to completely reinstall the OS once a new beta ships.
That all changed when Apple released a stealth (13A603) GM update a few days ago, which didn’t feature an update in the Mac App Store. Either you needed to completely reinstall with the new GM build, or just deal with the outdated (13A598) GM build until hopefully OS X 10.9.1 places you back on the correct upgrade path.
Sure this was annoying, but it didn’t sound like a huge deal to me until I wanted to download Mavericks this evening in order to make a USB install key, and was continuously met with an error message.
The error in question was as follows:
OS X v10.9 is already installed on this computer. Use the Updates page to install the 10.9 update or if you would like to download the full OS X installer click Continue.
After clicking continue, nothing happened. No download, no nothing.
After fumbling around for hours, I think I finally stumbled upon the fix for the issue. For some unknown reason, I had a previous Mavericks beta release hidden from the normal list of purchased items. Going to Store > View My Account > and clicking the Manage link under the iTunes in the Cloud section revealed the unexplained hidden Mavericks beta. Clicking Unhide and then Done was the trick needed to fix this issue.
After doing that simple task, I could now download Mavericks like normal. Now I can finally get to making my USB install key like I planned.
I still can’t exactly explain how the Mavericks beta appeared under hidden items, but I figure I must have accidentally clicked the ‘x’ icon next to the item in the Mac App Store’s Purchases section.
So, anyway, the moral of this story is to unhide the hidden Mavericks file in order to fix the “OS X v10.9 is already installed on this computer” error message.
Was this able to help you out at all? If so, let me know in the comment section.