Create a bootable OS X El Capitan USB Drive: Making a bootable OS X El Capitan USB Drive is easy and doesn’t take very long at all. Easiest way to create a bootable OS X El Capitan flash drive.
My brother-in-law brought me a Mac to fix, it looks like the OS was wiped or corrupted and the recovery partition was useless. It had El Capitan, but I've not been able to create a usable bootable USB using the DMG from Apple's site. I've tried with my M1 MacBook, I've tried using TransMac on Windows, but that didn't seem to help (wasn't bootable). I'm at the point where I'm thinking I need to tell him I'll have to purchase the physical media because the recovery mode won't even let me download the OS, I assume because you need an iCloud account with the OS tied to it. I can't believe how needlessly complicated this is (or I'm making it?). /whine
DiskMaker X (formerly Lion DiskMaker) is an application built with AppleScript that you can use with many versions of OS X to build a bootable drive from OS X installer program (the one you download from the App Store). As soon as you launch the application, it tries to find the OS X Install program with Spotlight. Then, it proposes to build a bootable install disk and make it look as nice as possible. It’s the easiest way to build an OS X Installer in a few clicks ! Then you can use the Install drive to fully re-install the OS on a freshly formated drive, or install it on your many Macs without re-downloading the full installer.
Create Bootable Usb El Capitan Hackintosh
Make OS X El Capitan Bootable USB Flash Drive, Here’s How Tutorial By Paul Morris October 1st, 2015 After months of hard work and continuous progress, OS X 10.11 El Capitan is finally out as a free-of-charge upgrade via the Mac App Store.
Jump over the break to learn how to use DiskMaker X…
1. Get an an empty flash drive with at least 8GB of storage
2. Download OS X El Capitan
3. Download DiskMaker X
4. Double-click on the .dmg file to open it and drag-and-drop the DiskMaker X app into the Applications folder
Create Usb Bootable El Capitan Disk
5. Now load DIskMaker X. When you load the app, it will ask you which version of OS X do you want to make a boot disk of. You can choose Mavericks, Yosemite and of course, El Capitan. We’ll choose El Capitan
Create Usb Bootable El Capitan Dvd
6. Now, the app will search for a copy of OS X El Capitan. Once it found your El Capitan copy, it will ask you if you want to use the copy that it found or you want to use another copy. If you downloaded it from the app store ( step 2 ), choose ‘Use this copy’
7. Now the app will ask you about your thumb drive, and it will tell you that will be completely erased before copying OS X El Capitan onto it…
8. Now the app will format your flash drive and ask you for your admin password. Once you enter your admin password, DiskMaker X will start copying the necessary El Capitan files onto your flash drive.
NOTE: this process will take a while. Be patient….
Create Bootable Usb El Capitan Without Terminal
9. When you’re done, the app will tell you that the boot disk is ready, you’ll see that your flash drive has been renamed as OS X 10.11 Install Disk and it will be opened. Now all you have to do is restart your Mac and and after you here the chime sound, press the Option ( Alt ) key until you see the option to choose the flash drive to boot from.