- When finished, OS X El Capitan will boot into a brand new clean install, running through the initial OS X setup process on the Mac as if the Mac was brand new. No files, no data, nothing will be on the Mac except for what comes with OS X El Capitan, that is what a clean install is for.
- Oct 04, 2015 Created a bootable USB with El Capitan installer. Booted from it, erased my MBP (mid 2009), clean install from USB installer. Decided to use migration assistant, most apps not working plus all the clutter from pre clean install. Decided to do another clean install but MBP won't boot from USB and uses the recovery version instead.
- I tried to clean install OS X El Capitan on my Mac, but it won’t boot from the USB drive. Here are the steps I took to create the bootable USB drive (I have a Mid-2014 MacBook Pro with Retina Display): Downloaded the latest OS X El Capitan (10.11.3) from the Mac App Store.
Once you’ve done that, here’s how to install, reinstall, or upgrade to El Capitan, step by step: Boot from your Recovery HD partition by restarting your Mac while holding down the Command+R keys. The OS X Utilities window appears. Select Reinstall OS X, and click Continue. The OS X El Capitan splash screen appears.
Install OSX El Capitan on a PC (MBR)
Prerequisites
- A real Mac or Hackintosh
- A spare disk drive – at least 8Gb, preferably USB
- An 8Gb or larger USB stick
- The Install OSX El Capitan.app from the App Store
- A disk partition to install in
Play Music From Usb Drive
Install on spare disk drive
Connect your spare drive to your PC. Use the method described here to build the El Capitan install USB stick and install OSX using the GPT partition scheme on your spare disk drive. Check it boots up OK and works OK.
Copy to your MBR partition
Use the Disk Utility to either copy the El Capitan partition to your MBR partition, or create a disk image and restore it to your MBR partition. Install Clover on your new El Capitan partition using the MBR options.
Copy the kexts you used to build the USB stick to the new El Capitan partition in EFI>CLOVER>kexts>10.11. I needed FakeSMC.kext, NullCPUPowerManagement.kext and a ethernet driver AppleRTL8169Ethernet.kext. Disconnect the spare disk and reboot to check the El Capitan installation boots OK and works OK. If it worked on your GPT disk then it should be OK on MBR with the same drivers.
Linux Usb Download
The problem with creating a GPT partitioned disk and installing on it is that you end up with a bios boot menu item ‘Mac OSX’ which you can’t delete, even using the Clover EFI shell or the linux utility efibootmgr. I’ve got two flavours of linux and efibootmgr refuses to work on both of them. It may be possible to get around this by installing on a USB drive.
I have since found you need to run the Clover EFI shell while doing a UEFI boot to get access to the bios boot menu items.
Later releases
I couldn’t get this to work on Sierra and High Sierra because the installer automagically creates a recovery partition which doesn’t get transferred. So I have converted to UEFI, which works fine using the USB stick method.