Summary

1. El Capitan Mac Os Bootable Usb Download
2. Make A Bootable Mac Disk
3. Mac Os El Capitan Bootable Usb Windows
4. Create Bootable Usb Mac Os Install El Capitan

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).

El Capitan Mac Os Bootable Usb Download

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. Kingdom come deliverance console item codes. 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).

If you wanna create bootable USB flash drive for Mac OS X El Capitan on Windows PC. You need a TransMac Software. That’s not a problem if you use a computer that supports legacy or UEFI. Just you need TransMac and El Capitan dmg file. Siddharth choubisa September 20, 2016 at 3:43 PM. Download: OS X El Capitan This downloads as a disk image named InstallMacOSX.dmg. 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. If you wanna create bootable USB flash drive for Mac OS X El Capitan on Windows PC. You need a TransMac Software. That’s not a problem if you use a computer that supports legacy or UEFI. Just you need TransMac and El Capitan dmg file. Siddharth choubisa September 20, 2016 at. Once downloaded move the Install Mac OS X El Capitan.app to your Mac, and then create a new bootable USB, Create a bootable installer for macOS - Apple Support More Less Feb 28, 2017 11:59 PM.

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!)

Make A Bootable Mac Disk

Then you need to get a program called ‘dmg2img’ Free download euro train simulator for windows 7.

You can then extract the DMG

Mac Os El Capitan Bootable Usb Windows

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 Why does word for mac take so much space.

Now you can extract the .pkg file. It will extract to the current working directory

Create Bootable Usb Mac Os Install El Capitan

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.