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El Capitan Usb Bootable Installer

If you use pkgutil to expand the InstallMacOSX.pkg it opens to three items, the Distribution file, InstallMacOSX.pkg and Resources. You can alter the Distribution file to ignore the supported platform check, see below.

Creating a Bootable USB. Once you have done all of the steps above, it’s time to create a bootable USB that we’ll be using to install El Capitan. For this, open up Diskmaker X; it should ask you what version of OS X you are using to create a bootable drive. How to Create Mac OS X El Capitan 10.11.6 USB Installer for PC /LaptopIn this tutorial, I will show you how to create Mac OS X El capitan 10.11.6 bootable US.

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. Aug 25, 2021 USB Flash Drive 8Gb Get one on Amazon here: (For El Capitan need a 16GB USB Stick) Mac OS Installer retail Version of Yosemite, El Capitan or Mac OS Sierra, choose one you desire to make the bootable USB.


Creating the Install OS X El Capitan.app on a mac that came with a newer OS than El Capitan.


Download the InstallMacOSX.dmg from Section 4 of How To Upgrade To El Capitan

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Double-click to open InstallMacOSX.dmg to Install MacOSX.pkg.

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Drag InstallMacOSX.pkg to the Desktop.


Open Terminal, enter the text

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A folder will be created on the Desktop after a while with the contents of the .pkg file.

In there you will see an item called Distribution, Control-click on that and select Open With

go to Other and select Text Edit.


When the file opens scroll down to the section that reads,



function isSupportedPlatform(){


type in at the end return true; so it now reads as,



function isSupportedPlatform(){return true;


Now click Save and close the document.


Go back to Terminal and enter the text,



press Return, after several minutes, be patient, (check to see if the prompt has returned to Terminal) a new package will be created on the Desktop.


When created double-click on that and an installation window will open where you will now convert the

new InstallElCapitan.pkg to the Install OS X El Capitan.app which will be placed in your Applications folder.


You can now create a bootable USB using the install app and createinstallmedia,

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If you have the time I would be grateful if you could give this a trial, it works here on my mac, but I would like confirmation from yourself or any others reading this that the procedure works on macs that came with macOS Sierra or newer pre-installed. Oh and tell me if my description of the procedure is easy to follow and understand..



Jan 15, 2020 12:58 AM

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

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).

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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

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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

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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!

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When you’re done, you may need to use Parted or a similar utility to re-format your USB as a normal drive again.