Unexpected language selection screen during upgrade

Hey folks. Care to shed a light on this one?

I'm on a MBAir 13" early 15 running Yosemite Using latest OC patcher downloaded yesterday. Want to get to Sonoma, via Monterey (2 consecutive upgrades - already did this on a 2012 MB Pro)

When running the OC patcher it can't download installers. It says: "Error - Failed to download installer Catalog from Apple". That's annoying but I found 2 ways to get around it; 1) Download an installer manually (ic found Monterey on mrmacintosch.com) and present that one to the OC patcher, and 2) make a Monterey bootable disk with OC patcher on my already upgraded MB Pro.

(Side note; this 2nd option may not be perfect because the USB is then not really created to upgrade the Mac on which it was made. But OK...)

It doesn't matter which method I use; when I boot from USB I do not get the expected screen! What I should get is a screen like at 4:39 of this YT video; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8djeFJ1czU. But what I get instead is a language selection screen!

As if Monterey will just be installed anew, without keeping existing user environment!

I'm scared to continue now as I absolutely do not want to lose my current user environment on that MBAir.

Anyone got any tips? Been in the same situation?

submitted by /u/TheAfricaBug
[link] [comments]