Bootable USB Drive Not Appearing

[kcxstrange]

I have an iMac from 2009 that was my dad's, I erased the hard drive so I could install a new copy of El Capitan on it which is what was previously installed. My only other computer is an HP laptop running W10.

I am having trouble creating a bootable USB of El Capitan that is recognized by the iMac as bootable. I am trying to make the USB in a fairly odd way which may be the problem. I format the drive using disk utility on the iMac as Apple Extended (Journaled) then use balenaEtcher on my W10 computer to flash the drive with El Capitan. When plugged into the iMac this drive still shows up in Disk Utility but is marked as not bootable. When I try to boot from it the only drive that comes up is the Recovery partition.

Is it because I am formatting on iMac then using W10 to flash the drive? I have also tried created the drive only using W10 in file system formats exFAT & NTFS. No luck. I only have the W10 laptop and the recovery partition/disk utility to work with on the iMac. Sorry if I am missing information or doing something stupid. This is my first time re-imaging an Apple computer. I appreciate any help!

 

[Lufbrarunner]

Are you using this method to create you Bootable USB?

Note that El Capitan has a slightly different workflow.

 

[TonyAguila]

I have an iMac from 2009 that was my dad's, I erased the hard drive so I could install a new copy of El Capitan on it which is what was previously installed. My only other computer is an HP laptop running W10.

I am having trouble creating a bootable USB of El Capitan that is recognized by the iMac as bootable. I am trying to make the USB in a fairly odd way which may be the problem. I format the drive using disk utility on the iMac as Apple Extended (Journaled) then use balenaEtcher on my W10 computer to flash the drive with El Capitan. When plugged into the iMac this drive still shows up in Disk Utility but is marked as not bootable. When I try to boot from it the only drive that comes up is the Recovery partition.

Is it because I am formatting on iMac then using W10 to flash the drive? I have also tried created the drive only using W10 in file system formats exFAT & NTFS. No luck. I only have the W10 laptop and the recovery partition/disk utility to work with on the iMac. Sorry if I am missing information or doing something stupid. This is my first time re-imaging an Apple computer. I appreciate any help!

You mentioned that you erased the iMac’s hard drive. Does this mean that your only means of booting up is from an external device? Also, how did you erase the internal hard drive.

If you have wifi, and if you know that the iMac can connect to your wifi, try rebooting into Recovery. Start the iMac and immediately hold down ⌘-R (I’m assuming you have a functioning keyboard attached). When Recovery comes up, select Disk Utility to erase/format the hard drive. It’s safe to assume that you will need to choose HFS+ for the format.

When the format is done, exit Disk Utility and the choose to install macOS. Depending on the date your 2009 iMac was issued, Recovery will present you with anywhere from El Capitan to High Sierra. It will be the latest system that you Mac will run, and you have no choice.

Proceed with the installation. After it’s done, since you probably don’t have a backup to restore from, just elect to create your Admin account and then reboot to, hopefully, get to the login screen.

If you need to create a USB system installer… that’s for a later discussion.

 

[kcxstrange]

Are you using this method to create you Bootable USB?

Note that El Capitan has a slightly different workflow.

I have tried formatting on mac with apple extended (journal) format then flashing it on w10. I have also tried formatting in exFAT and NTFS and flashing on w10. What is different about El Capitan?

 

[Lufbrarunner]

• Download: OS X El Capitan
  This downloads as a disk image named InstallMacOSX.dmg. On a Mac that is compatible with El Capitan, open the disk image and run the installer within, named InstallMacOSX.pkg. It installs an app named Install OS X El Capitan into your Applications folder. You will create the bootable installer from this app, not from the disk image or .pkg installer.

 

[MightyGem]

It sounds as if all you have is a copy of El Capitan on your USB drive. This, in itself, is not bootable. Have you tried double clicking the file to see if the installer will run? You can then install it on the Mac.

To make a bootable copy have a look at these two sites:

How to quickly create a macOS bootable USB on Windows 10 - Pureinfotech

Here are the steps to create a macOS bootable USB media (Ventura) with GPT partition support on Windows 10, 11, 8.1, and 7 to rescue your Mac.

pureinfotech.com

How to Create a macOS Bootable USB on Windows 11/10/7 PC | 2024