This allows you to use Disk Utility to wipe your entire drive-or repartition it. To finish, answer any questions asked by the installer.In Recovery Mode, macOS runs a special sort of recovery environment. Highlight the volume you just named as shown below, then click on the Continue button.īelow is an image of El Capitan installing. When you see window, similar to the image shown below, select Quit Disk Utility from the Disk Utility pulldown on the menu bar. When the popup window shown below appears, click on the Done button. When finished, click on the Erase button on the popup window. Set Format and Scheme as shown in the image below. Note: Your internal drive will not be named VBOX HARDDISK Media.Įnter a Name for the volume to hold El Capitan. Highlight the internal drive as shown in the image below, then click on the Erase button.

from the Utilities pulldown on the menu bar. Proceed until you reach a window similar to the image shown below. The first window viewed should be similar to the image shown bellow. The Mac should start booting from the flash drive. Click on the text Install El Capitan below an icon.Turn on the Mac and immediately hold down the option key until the Startup Manager icons appear.Insert the El Capitan bootable flash drive installer into an USB port on the Mac.

Disconnect all devices from the Mac, except for any wired keyboard or mouse that you may be using.

You should see similar images when you install to your 2011 Mac. The instructions for creating this flash drive can be found here. The installation was performed using a physical USB El Capitan flash drive installer. Note: The images shown below are from a VirtualBox install of El Capitan. All the articles are about how to create the bootable drive.ĭoes anyone know how to actually install the OS? Perhaps some command I can enter into the terminal at the Recovery screen? Google searches for ' install Mac OS from bootable drive' turn up nothing about the actual installation. When I do connect, I click try again and then a fail prompt comes up saying 'A required download is missing'. When I go back to the menu, and click 'Reinstall OS X', I get a prompt saying 'OS X can't be installed because you aren't connected to the internet'. When I turn on my iMac 2011, it takes me straight to the Recovery screen (because I previously Erased the main drive). However, now that I have the Bootable drive containing Mac OS El Capitan, I cannot find good information on how to actually install from it. I asked earlier about how to create a Bootable drive for the purpose of installing Mac OS on an older machine, and I received a great answer (thanks to Anderson).

Install mac os disk utility