Create El Capitan Usb Installer

Installer

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.

Create El Capitan Usb InstallerInstallerUsbCreate El Capitan Usb Installer

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 Installer Windows 7

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

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:

1: Rename the USB Flash Drive to Become the OS X El Capitan Bootable Installer. The next thing you’ll want to do is rename the target volume that you wish to turn into a bootable installer drive, in this case an external USB flash drive. To avoid any confusion, we’re naming the USB drive to “ElCapInstaller” (without the quotations. Plug in your USB device that is larger than 8 GB that you'll be making bootable and putting the El Capitan installer on. You'll want to copy any data you want to save off of it at this point. I used a brand new SD Card (plugged into a USB adapter), so I didn't have anything to backup. Rename the USB Flash Drive to Become the OS X El Capitan Bootable Installer: The next thing you’ll. To install El Capitan, make sure the USB drive is inserted into the computer, then restart the computer while holding the Option (alt) key on your keyboard. Wait until the Startup Manager pops up, then select the 'OS X Base System' volume. Alternatively, you can just hold down the C key while starting up to boot directly into the USB drive.

Create El Capitan Usb Installer Download

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

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 El Capitan Usb Installer

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