All you need is an 8 GB (minimum) USB thumb drive, a USB, FireWire, or Thunderbolt drive or an SD-Card the OS X 10.11 El Capitan Installer from the App Store (once the download is complete the installer file will appear in the Applications folder - do not move it) and the DiskMaker X installer. Like the previous versions, DiskMaker X is free of charge (however, donations are accepted).

Luckily, DiskMaker X helps fill the void by allowing you to make a bootable OS X 10.11 El Capitan USB install drive, making a task such as installing on several different machines easier. So if you previously relied on DVD installs, you won’t be able to do so with this version. And as with previous OS X versions dating back to OS X 10.7, El Capitan is only available for install via download from the App Store. While trying to image over the net, I did also try entering my iCloud credentials but would get something like 'this is not currently available' it was certainly talking online because it prompted me for multi-factor authentication.With OS X El Capitan, Apple has built on many of the changes that were brought on by Yosemite. I did initially try using TransMac on Windows to format a USB key and restore an image to use as recovery or install media, but either the images I had were no good or the USB key never came out bootable.

Insert USB in iMac and use Option + R (I think) to get the boot options, select the install media and go.

Once back in the OS, I used Apple's terminal command example to build the install media and that went flawlessly.

I think I was supposed to just exit the OSX installer instead of trying to go through it. In recovery I set the startup disk back to the primary OS drive to get back in.

I initially broke something because I launched the pkg file/app, thought it was going to setup USB key since I pointed it to the key, but it set the VM to boot to recovery.

- From within the VM, through Safari, downloaded the El Capitan DMG.

Inside VM OS: Format a USB key using disk utility, name it something simple (ex: recovery) to access later in terminal.

- Used Step 5 from this page to modify the VM config so that it would properly boot.Created an OS X El Capitan VM in VirtualBox using the downloaded VMDK as the primary drive.This is an outline of how I created the install media from a Windows PC:ĭownloaded their 7-part El Capitan VMDK (virtual machine disk file)ĭownloaded VirtualBox and the Extension Pack (necessary for getting USB keys to work correctly). I was able to create proper restore media from Apple using my Windows machine and the Mac seems healthy (HDD, wired/wireless, etc.) except the screen has some light wavy bars in it. This is a 20' iMac early-2008, didn't know it was that old.

Mac os el capitan bootable usb