

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.

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). 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). Since there wasn’t much worth saving I wiped it and initiated recovery mode in order to re-install OS X (El Capitan). 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. You'll need to change MyVolume to the name of your USB installer, but it should take care of the rest for you.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. The command for El Capitan is: sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ El\ Capitan.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia -volume /Volumes/MyVolume -applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ El\ Capitan.app You'll need to download it, open the DMG, run the installer inside it which will make the Install MacOS El Capitan.app and then you need to make a USB, which you can do with this link: Note that will need a working Mac to download to. To force the date and trick the installer, take a look at this post:įailing that, or if you just want a clean installer, at the time of my reply there's a full El Capitan download here: get your updates (there will be a bunch).I don't think you'll have any issues with downloading software updates for it after you're installed, so it should be safe to: My suggestion would be to reset the date on the computer to a time in the past when the certificate was valid, install El Capitan, and when you're up and running you can reset the date to the correct date. The installers were re-signed in 2019 to last until 2029, but if you've bought a USB from someone, it's entirely possible it's a pre-2019 image and has the expiry issue. Without knowing the exact error, it's hard to be 100% sure, but El Capitan was one of the more frequently twitchy installers in my time doing USBs. What's happening is the computer date is past the certificate expiry, and it throws an error.

This sounds a lot like the installer certificate has expired. I used to provide USB installers for old macOS, including El Capitan. Two options to try here: bodge the date, or get a new installer.
