After I got my new MBP, I decided to sell my old 2010 MBP. I wanted to keep all my existing data on my old laptop, so I decided to swap out its SSD and to put in a brand new one.

With that said, you can apparently hack later versions of macOS install media to get it on that machine (up to El Capitan listed) but YMMV. I have access to a 2008 early model MacBook Pro that has Mavericks installed and it allowed me to download the El Capitan installation media (which I used to update the 2010 Mac Pro I have access to; now. I downloaded El Capitan from the 'App Store' and then used 'DiskMaker X 5' to make a bootable usb. Restarted my laptop and booted from USB, and onto the El Capitan installation. From there I formatted the new SSD (MacOS Extended (Journaled) with a single GUID partition). According to testing, the SSD upgrade makes Mac faster, in the 20 seconds versus 38 seconds boot up times. The computer with the SSD upgrade is 20% faster and takes less than half the time to copy a file. So, enjoy OS X El Capitan on your new SSD disk. We hope our OS X El Capitan moving guide helped you.

This video shows you how to upgrade your MacBook Pro to a Solid State Drive SSD and goes through the process of how to create a bootable USB with OS X El Cap. Choose to Install OS X on the formatted SSD. Follow the prompts until El Capitan is installed. Here’s link to a video on how to physically install the SSD as well as run the software installation. If you’d rather install Yosemite on the SSD then follow the How to Install Yosemite on a New SSD guide. Tweet Follow @TwitterDev.

The process of installing Yosemite on the new SSD was not as straightforward as I would have liked. I thought I’d blog about it to help anyone else who needed to do the same.

Basically I was trying to sell a 2010 MBP with a new SSD, with Yosemite installed but not configured.

1. Download Yosemite installation from the App store. It might complain that you already have it installed but download it anyway. It will be downloaded to /Applications and be named Install OS X Yosemite.app
2. Create a bootable image from the Yosemite installer on a USB stick larger than 6GB. In a terminal run:

where MyVolume is the name of your USB stick. Change this to match the name of your USB stick.

3. Physically install SSD into the target laptop.
4. Insert the Yosemite USB stick into the target laptop and power up. (This might take a while.)
5. When the menu finally turns up, choose Disk Utility and format the SSD as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with a unique name.
6. Once complete, exit from Disk Utility and return the main menu.
7. Choose to Install OS X on the formatted SSD.
8. Follow the prompts until Yosemite is installed.

Here’s link to a video on how to physically install the SSD as well as run the software installation.

If you’d rather install El Capitan on the SSD then follow the How to Install El Capitan on a New SSD guide.

I’m trying to sell a 2009 MacbookPro. It’s the model MacbookPro5.5 and Apple supports macOS El Capitan 10.11 as latest available version.

El Capitan Install Usb

I’ve wiped all data from the installed SSD and had to boot from an external disk. Now I’ve got two problems:

1. I’ve only got a Mac with Big Sur and Apple Silicon. I cannot use the package installer from the download provided by Apple to create the installer App for El Capitan. However, I need access to the installer so that I’m able to use the createinstallmedia command.
2. The 2009 MacbookPro is already wiped and has only access to the recovery mode. You cannot execute the package installer in Recovery Mode to extract the media.

Luckily I’ve found this blog post from Chris Warrick who explained how to extract the installer App from the package:

1. Attach an external Disk which contains the downloaded pkg from Apple. You’ll need enough space on that Disk to extract the pkg and it needs to be writeable
2. Open the Terminal from inside the Recovery Mode
3. Go to the mounted volume
4. Extract the package:

Now we can try to create the install media from the installer app. Make sure you’ve attach another disk which can be overwritten by the installer. In this example its named „MyBlankUSBDrive“:

The InstallESD.dmg image is missing, which we’ll need to add to the right location:

Now we’ll have a valid installation medium which can be used to start the installer from. You can reboot from that disk and should be able to install El Capitan.

However, I’ve encountered another annoying issue which caused the installer to fail:

Install El Capitan On New Ssd Drive

El Capitan Installer cannot be verified

Mac Os El Capitan Install

Oh great… On to the next commands you can try from the Terminal inside the Recovery OS:

1. installer -pkg /Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD/Packages/OSInstall.mpkg -target /Volumes/'XXX' where XXX is the name of the disk you’re installing to.
2. Wait for the installation to say it’s complete. You will not see any sort of progress display.

Clean Install El Capitan

Great, you’ve got El Capitan installed! Apple had some issues with certificates and people found a way to either use the above commands for installation or you’ll have to tinker with your Macs time settings so that the signature is valid again. I would have expected that Apple resigned all installers so I wouldn’t have to use these commands at all but doesn’t look like they did.