El Capitan Bootable Disk
The install of El Capitan, at least what I thought was the installation, took a while. A screen shows up with the 10.11 logo stating to install click continue, agree to terms and install OS, I got the option to use disk utility, time machine or recovery or click the install button. I clicked, installation (from bootable flash drive) it stated to restart, with this done a message came that there was installation media on the destination volume, try again.
I restarted and got a progress bar (Apple logo above) which never fully finished, or it did but nothing happened. After walking away for an hour or two, I powered the machine down, restarted it with the option button to get the start up disk manager but only got the apple logo and progress bar, again. I tried to start in recovery mode, also in safe mode with the progress bar appearing after each attempt.
Obviously, I cannot access the drive to remove whatever install media is present on that disk. What options do I have at this point?
Thank you
I
Making The Bootable El Capitan USB Drive. We’re all here for one thing, so lets dive right in at the deep-end and get started with the process. We first of all need the OS X El Capitan installer that we alluded to as part of the “Pre-Requisites” above. Launch the Mac App Store and search for El Capitan. 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.Select OS X El Capitan installer on the USB flash drive and then press Return to start up the Mac from the installer. Apple does not sell an optical media version of El Capitan. You need to use OS X Recovery or a USB drive to re-install El Capitan, which is relatively simple to create. All you need is an 8 GB USB drive and a computer running OS X. Instructions on how to create such an installer are here: How to make a bootable OS X 10.11 El Capitan installer drive.
DiskMaker X (formerly Lion DiskMaker) is an application built with AppleScript that you can use with many versions of OS X to build a bootable drive from OS X installer program (the one you download from the App Store). As soon as you launch the application, it tries to find the OS X Install program with Spotlight. Then, it proposes to build a bootable install disk and make it look as nice as possible. It’s the easiest way to build an OS X Installer in a few clicks ! Then you can use the Install drive to fully re-install the OS on a freshly formated drive, or install it on your many Macs without re-downloading the full installer.
Jump over the break to learn how to use DiskMaker X…
1. Get an an empty flash drive with at least 8GB of storage
El Capitan Bootable Disk Installer
2. Download OS X El Capitan
Bootable El Capitan Dmg
3. Download DiskMaker X
4. Double-click on the .dmg file to open it and drag-and-drop the DiskMaker X app into the Applications folder
5. Now load DIskMaker X. When you load the app, it will ask you which version of OS X do you want to make a boot disk of. You can choose Mavericks, Yosemite and of course, El Capitan. We’ll choose El Capitan
6. Now, the app will search for a copy of OS X El Capitan. Once it found your El Capitan copy, it will ask you if you want to use the copy that it found or you want to use another copy. If you downloaded it from the app store ( step 2 ), choose ‘Use this copy’
7. Now the app will ask you about your thumb drive, and it will tell you that will be completely erased before copying OS X El Capitan onto it…
8. Now the app will format your flash drive and ask you for your admin password. Once you enter your admin password, DiskMaker X will start copying the necessary El Capitan files onto your flash drive.
NOTE: this process will take a while. Be patient….
El Capitan Bootable Drive
9. When you’re done, the app will tell you that the boot disk is ready, you’ll see that your flash drive has been renamed as OS X 10.11 Install Disk and it will be opened. Now all you have to do is restart your Mac and and after you here the chime sound, press the Option ( Alt ) key until you see the option to choose the flash drive to boot from.