- Os El Capitan Bootable Usb Download
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- Os El Capitan Problems
- Os X 10.11 El Capitan Bootable Usb
Summary
How to make a bootable USB drive on Linux Mint (19.3) to allow you to install Mac OS X El Capitan on a MacBook with broken or corrupted recovery mode.
Background
The El Capitan DMG installer file, now available for download under the version of 10.11.6 for Mac OSX. Now the dmg file can be downloaded by any Mac device users. The Dmg file is known as the latest ISO regarding El Capitan operating system. When talking about the El Capitan OS X, this is the advanced OS, which has been released for the Mac. To create a bootable El Capitan installer drive, you need the El Capitan installer from the Mac App Store and a Mac-formatted drive that’s big enough to hold the installer and all its data. Created a bootable USB with El Capitan installer. Booted from it, erased my MBP (mid 2009), clean install from USB installer. Decided to use migration assistant, most apps not working plus all the clutter from pre clean install. Decided to do another clean install but MBP won't boot from USB and uses the recovery version instead. Bootable USB Stick - macOS X El Capitan 10.11 - Full OS Install, Reinstall, Recovery and Upgrade SANDISK USB FLASH DRIVE 2.0/3.1 - 16GB - 5 years warranty Latest certificate (expires These USBs are NOT produced by Apple.
I was recently given a 2011 MacBook Pro that had been “well-loved” and was therefore a mess of missing applications, ghost files and generally slow-as-hell. Since there wasn’t much worth saving I wiped it and initiated recovery mode in order to re-install OS X (El Capitan).
Having recently fixed a busted MacBook Air I had learned a bit about Recovery Mode (hold Command+R whilst pushing the Power button and release a few seconds after the machine wakes up). I tried that with this machine, and upon hitting “Reinstall MacOS X” was greeted with a prompt telling me it would take -2,148,456,222 days and 8 hours (an uncaught buffer overflow, me thinks). After about 30 seconds, a window pops up saying “Can’t download the additional components needed to install Mac OS X” and the installation gives up. The detailed error log says “Chunk validation failed, retrying” about 1000 times and eventually gives up altogether.
Further investigation suggests this may be something to do with security certificates having expired and hence the machine not being able to download the necessary files from Apple’s servers, but it seems the error can appear for all sorts of reasons. I also tried Internet Recovery (Command+Option+R) but that gave exactly the same error (and would also only have installed OS X Mountain Lion).
I then turned to attempting to make a bootable USB stick of OS X El Capitan from an image downloaded from Apple. I use Linux Mint on my main laptop and that was all I had available. Apple seem to assume everybody has a spare MacBook from which to create a bootable USB so they provide absolutely no documentation to help with this. I also couldn’t find a single guide online that worked from start to finish, so here I summarise what needs to be done.
Steps
As usual, this is all at your own risk 🙂
First you need to go to Apple’s OS Download Page and (step 4) get ahold of “InstallMacOSX.dmg” for El-Capitan. It’s a 6GB file so it might take a ‘lil while. You will also need to find a USB drive with at least 8GB capacity, and make sure it’s blank. The format doesn’t matter, because this procedure will format it correctly.
(In total you will need to use about 15-18GB of disk space by the time you’ve done all the extracting necessary, which shouldn’t be a problem for most computers but it was a challenge for my laptop with it’s 128GB SSD and dual boot Windows/Linux!)
Then you need to get a program called ‘dmg2img’
You can then extract the DMG
Now double click the .img file to mount it. In there is a InstallMaxOSX.pkg file. This requires a utility called “xar” to extract, which can be installed with these instructions (from https://www.oueta.com/linux/extract-pkg-and-mpkg-files-with-xar-on-linux/)
Then build and install with
Now you can extract the .pkg file. It will extract to the current working directory
Now, within the extracted files you will find something called InstallESD.dmg. This actually contains all the interesting boot files, but it isn’t a pristine image, so we can’t just burn it to a USB. Thankfully, a script exists to convert this DMG to a bootable usb, and it’s available here. It takes the DMG and writes everything directly to the USB in the right place.
ONE CAVEAT: When I ran this script on my InstallESD.dmg, it crashed because it didn’t recognise the checksum. I think this is because Apple updates the dmg’s anytime there is a security update for El Capitan so the checksum list isn’t updated. All I did was delete the checksum check from the script above. Essentially, just open the script and delete this section
Once I had done this, I ran the script with my USB connected (/dev/sdb for me, but CHECK YOURSELF with fdisk or similar) and after quite a while it finished copying.
I plugged the USB into the MacBook, and opened the startup menu by holding down Option whilst pushing the power button. This gave me the choice of booting from EFI, or choosing a WiFi network. Click on the EFI, and then follow the prompts to install OS X from the USB drive!
When you’re done, you may need to use Parted or a similar utility to re-format your USB as a normal drive again.
I will show you how to download macOS Beta, and then create a bootable macOS Monterey USB Installer Flash Disk!
If you want to install and test macOS Monterey, creating macOS 12 USB installer is the way to go! This will allow you to quickly install the OS on Intel and M1 Macs.
Step 1 – Enroll in Apple Developer Program
I’ll show you how to enroll into macOS Monterey Beta program. 3 different ways are listed below.
1. developer.apple.com = Developer Beta Profile – $99
2. beta.apple.com = Public Beta Profile – Free
3. Seedutil Binary = Pick between Public, Developer & Customer Seed – Free
Step 2 – Download macOS 12 Beta
You can go over to my macOS 12 Full Installer Database to grab the latest InstallAssistant.pkg file
Step 3 – How to create macOS Monterey Beta USB Installer
I have the steps listed below but if you want to watch a short video on the process, here it is.
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Step 3 – Install InstallAssistant.pkg
You will now see InstallAssistant.pkg in your Downloads folder. Double click to install it. This package puts the “macOS 12 Install app” into your Applications folder.
Step 4 Erase & Format your USB Flash Drive
Now that you have the macOS 12 Beta app in your /Applications folder you can create your USB Installer! The USB Flash Drive needs to be at least 16GB because the installer is about 12-14GB.
El Capitan Boot Disk
Plug in your USB Flash Drive
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Open up Disk Utility and erase your USB Flash drive. Be sure to use Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format.
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Step 5 Install macOS 12 Beta to your USB Drive
Open up the Terminal.app from /Applications/Utilities
2. type in Sudo then space
3. Drag your macOS 12 installer app to the terminal window
4. the full path is sudo /Applications/Install macOS 12 Beta.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia
5. Add the –volume option then drag your USB Flash Drive to the terminal window.
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The final full path will look like this sudo /Applications/Install macOS 12 Beta.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Untitled
Hit enter and then enter your account password.
From here the files will start to copy to your USB flash Drive. The total time should be about 5-10 min depending on your USB Flash drive speed.
macOS Monterey USB installer