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.)}

Install El Capitan From Usb Boot

You need a copy of the El Capitan installer to make a bootable USB. The El Capitan installer is downloaded to the /Applications folder, with the file name 'Install OS X El Capitan.' If you've installed El Capitan and want to create a bootable installer, re-download the installer from Apple. OS X El Capitan is finally here, and if you're looking to install Apple's new desktop OS fresh from the ground up, then you'll be needing a bootable USB flash drive to get started with the process.

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.

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.

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?

^{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.}

I accepted a Mid 2012 macbook pro from my dad, which hasn't been used for years (in fact since the year he bought it). So the first thing I did was upgrade the system straight to El Capitan, but then I found the system a bit slow so I am planning to install a new SSD and a new and clean OS for better experience.

So I started preparing all kinds of things, one of which is a USB containing the Install El Capitan app.I did this by downloading El Capitan from appstore and creating a usb media through the following command lines. The USB drive was erased and formatted before operation.

sudo /Applications/Install OS X El Capitan.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/OSX --applicationpath /Applications/Install OS X El Capitan.app --nointeraction

This should make the USB a install media. So I restarted, pressed option key and saw the original Macintosh HD and the USB, everything was going fine until now. Then I selected the USB and it just stuck at the loading screen like this.

I have been stuck here for hours. In fact I haven't installed the SSD yet. I'm just trying to see if the USB install media worked fine, but obviously it didn't. I know I could use a software to clone my system from HDD to the new SSD, that would be far more simpler, but I really want to install a new OS. Does anyone have any ideas about what the problem is or what should I do next? Thanks a lot.

MacBook Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11.4)

El Capitan State Beach

Posted on May 18, 2016 12:56 AM

Boot El Capitan From Usb