EI Capitan (10.11) is the last release of OS X. After it, the OS versions are under a name called macOS. From our observation, there are still many people using EI Capitan on their Mac as some of the apps are not running on macOS. Hence, if your Mac was something wrong with it and you need to create a bootable installation media to reinstall OS X EI Capitan on your Mac. Honestly speaking, it is a tough process for EI Capitan and you might receive errors when using the dmg file downloaded from Apple website.
Please don't worry. In this tutorial, we will share you all the necessary steps to make a bootable EI Capitan bootable USB on a Windows 10 PC. Here is a screenshot of our tutorial's output.
The El Capitan DMG installer file, now available for download under the version of 10.11.6 for Mac OSX. Now the dmg file can be downloaded by any Mac device users. The Dmg file is known as the latest ISO regarding El Capitan operating system. When talking about the El Capitan OS X, this is the advanced OS, which has been released for the Mac. Mac OS X El Capitan 10.11.1 InstallESD DMG free download standalone offline setup for Windows 32-bit and 64-bit. The macOS X El Capitan 10.11.1 is a powerful application providing stability, compatibility and the security of the Mac along with different updates and enhancements. Apr 06, 2021 For an OS X El Capitan installation, the file gets saved as a disk image named 'InstallMacOSX.dmg'. To install, open the disk image and run the installer named 'InstallMacOSX.pkg'. Mac Os 10.12 0 Download Dmg Os X El Capitan Dmg To Usb Chromecast Dmg For Mac 2019 How Is Dmg Different From Pkg Python 3.7 Dmg Installer Download Download Jdk-7u79-macosx-x64.dmg Download Os X Moutain Lion 10.7.0 Dmg Mount Dmg No Mountable File Systems Bouns Dmg From Ghost With Hectam Potion Brewing In The Dmg 5e.
P.S. If you have a Mac, then please follow this official guide to create EI Capitan USB installer on macOS by using createinstallmedia command: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372
sudo /Applications/Install OS X El Capitan.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/USBVolume --applicationpath /Applications/Install OS X El Capitan.app
Preparation
Please get started, there are a few things you should prepare for.
First, a USB drive with at least 16 GB storage as the installation file of EI Capitan (.dmg) is over 5.5GB. USB 3.0 is more recommended as it has faster reading and writing speed. This will save a lot of time.
Secondly, download EI Capitan (10.11.6) DMG file from this link: This is the modified version of Apple's dmg file dedicated for USB booting.
Warning: The download file hosted on Apple.com (InstallMacOSX.dmg) will only work on Mac platform. For creating installation media on Windows, please use the above link instead. The dmg file provided by Apple contains a .pkg file in DMG archive, which will result failure if you are using it on a PC.
Tutorial: How to Create EI Capitan Bootable USB on Windows 10 PC
To make a bootable USB from EI Capitan dmg file, we need a special software in place. In our case, it is UUByte DMG Editor, an award-winning app for creating bootable OS X and macOS USB installer.
Step 1: Install UUByte DMG Editor on your PC and open it from Desktop shortcut. After that, plug in a USB drive into the computer and eject other unused USB devices.
Os X Yosemite
Step 2: Click Burn button from welcome screen and import downloaded EI Capitan DMG file into the program. You will also see USB drive name in second field.
Step 3: Click Burn button at the bottom to write dmg file to USB drive. There is a progress bar on the screen. This tells how much time left for the burning task.
Step 4: Wait for 5-10 minutes and a bootable EI Capitan installation disk is created. You need to wait more time for USB 2.0 device.
Install OS X EI Capitan on Your Mac
Before installation starts, make sure the hardware meets the minimal requirements of EI Capitan. You can check it from here: https://support.apple.com/kb/SP728?locale=en_US
To install EI Capitan from USB, please insert the bootable disk into Mac. Keep pressing Option button during startup. You will see a drive name (Install OS X EI Capitan) on startup window. Click on it to enter into OS X Recovery mode.
From macOS Utitilies window, click Reinstall macOS and follow the screen prompt to install EI Capitan on your Mac.
The above is a complete tutorial that shows you how to easily create a bootable USB installer from EI Capitan DMG file on a Windows PC. And this is the easiest method you could find. No complex settings and command line!
Summary
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).
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. 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).
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!)
Then you need to get a program called ‘dmg2img’
You can then extract the DMG
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
How To Install El Capitan Dmg File
Now you can extract the .pkg file. It will extract to the current working directory
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
Os X El Capitan 10.11.6
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.