I am salvaging a mid 2013 MacBook Air 11' that was discarded with a broken screen backlight due to beverage spill and missing its SSD. ^{(I have a very tiny budget right now so I'm only spending on more expensive items when my testing shows the machine might work well.)}

On restart, Mac keeps trying to install it and now I can't get back into my Mac at all. Keep getting stuck on 'Installing on 'Macintosh HD' and 'About 24 minutes remaining' for an hour or two, then it comes up with something like 'It was not possible to install El Capitan', which I'm fully aware; however it doesn't seem to give me any obvious. Apr 27, 2021 On a Mac that is compatible with El Capitan, open the disk image and run the installer within, named InstallMacOSX.pkg. It installs an app named Install OS X El Capitan into your Applications folder. You will create the bootable installer from this app, not from the disk image or.pkg installer. Use the 'createinstallmedia' command in Terminal.

I got the Apple Store to test the hardware then tested the computer myself by taking about two days to install OS X from one USB 2.0 flash drive to another USB 2.0 flash drive using an external display.

1. Banglazed said: For simplicity, download the El Capitan, rename flash drive to ElCapInstaller, enter that above into terminal and boom done. Don’t need to format the USB since the command used in the terminal will format and create the bootable USB.
2. One easy way to do this is to partition the Macs hard drive and install OS X El Capitan onto that new separate partition, this will insure that OS X El Capitan 10.11 remains away from the stable build of OS X 10.10 or 10.9, and allows the user to boot between the Mac OS releases as they see fit.
3. How to Perform a Clean Install of OS X El Capitan. OS X El Capitan (OS X 10.11) offers two installation methods. This guide focuses on the 'clean install' method. When you install El Capitan on your current startup drive with the clean install method, you erase everything on the drive. That includes OS X, your user data, and personal files.

It seemed to work quite well other than that it ran at about 1% the speed of a normal Mac for anything that required disk access. This made it hard to test in any depth as problems could easily be due to OS X internal timeouts.

I have now purchased a USB 3.0 external hard drive and knowing how slow USB 2.0 flash drives are to install from and to, I'm hoping to use the fast external hard drive for both, but I'm not sure whether this is possible or how.

El Capitan Os X Download

The external drive happened to come pre-formatted for Mac with two partitions, which to seems ideal.

Can I just copy the contents of the El Capitan bootable installer USB to one of the partitions? I fear I may need to copy it as a drive/partition rather than as a file or folder, since it must be bootable. Does such a copy require special software?

How To Install El Capitan

^{I need to ask the experts here without being able to experiment since I'm unable to justify the purchase price of a magsafe 2 power supply until I'm confident the machine will work well. I am able to borrow a power supply only occasionally from friends.}

^{I realize doing an Internet OS restore via Wi-Fi is another possibility but the Wi-Fi I have access to is both slow and behind a captive portal. So for this question I'm not pursuing that option thank you.}