Create El Capitan Usb

I am trying to rescue my dad's 2008 iMac. It is running Snow Leopard but the most recent OS it supports is El Capitan. It won't boot past a spinning progress bar on a grey screen, and will not boot into Recovery Mode or Safe Mode.

It seems to me next step is to try a bootable USB stick. I am running into walls trying to make the stick from my own computer, which is an M1 MacBook Air running Big Sur.

Create el capitan usb

An El Capitan .DMG is downloadable directly from the Apple Support page, which provides instructions on how to make a bootable volume, with a major caveat On a Mac that is compatible with El Capitan, open the disk image and run the installer within, named InstallMacOSX.pkg

  • These instructions work to create a bootable install disk for all versions of macOS from macOS 11 Big Sur back to OS X El Capitan 10.11. What’s needed to create a bootable install disk A USB flash drive or other secondary volume formatted as Mac OS Extended, with at least 14GB of available storage.
  • It to the InstallMACOSX.pkg. Double-click on that and you will get an installer window. (this does not install El Capitan), follow the prompts and it will create the Install OS X El Capitan.app. In your Applications folder. Now you should be able to use the createinstallmedia command to create. Your bootable USB. Nov 24, 2019 3:55 PM.

I used a utility to extract the Install OS X El Capitan.app file from the .dmg and then ran the terminal command from that support page:

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

How to create El Capitan installation USB drive with createinstallmedia tool The createinstallmedia is a command line tool distributed with OS X installer. When you have prepared your USB flash drive and El Capitan installer is downloaded from App Store open Terminal and type command. The following steps can be used to create a USB installer for El Capitan. Use instructions on the Apple website How to get old versions of macOS to download InstallMacOSX.dmg. Use the Disk Utility to erase a 16 GB or larger flash drive. If the Disk Utility window has a View pulldown menu, make sure Show All Devices is selected.

How To Create El Capitan Usb

But this yields /Applications/Install OS X El Capitan.app does not appear to be a valid OS installer application.
When I google this error some results indicate it is due to an expired file, but changing my system date to 2016 does not fix it. I assume the real problem is a system incompatibility.

Create A Bootable El Capitan Usb

Create el capitan usb installer

Create El Capitan Usb Installer

Surely there is just an ISO I can get and write without all these hoops?s