I am salvaging a mid 2013 MacBook Air 11' that was discarded with a broken screen backlight due to beverage spill and missing its SSD. (I have a very tiny budget right now so I'm only spending on more expensive items when my testing shows the machine might work well.)
I got the Apple Store to test the hardware then tested the computer myself by taking about two days to install OS X from one USB 2.0 flash drive to another USB 2.0 flash drive using an external display.
Download From Usb To Computer
It seemed to work quite well other than that it ran at about 1% the speed of a normal Mac for anything that required disk access. This made it hard to test in any depth as problems could easily be due to OS X internal timeouts.
Jul 22, 2020 The Mac Mini currently has El Capitan installed, plus when I upgraded to El Cap, I saved the installer. I tried to just run that from the Mac Mini with the OWC SSD hooked up via USB. It starts, checks the external drive, begins to install, and then stops at different points. Sometimes it stops when it has to reboot. Quit Disk Utility and install El Capitan. If you already attached the SSD you can use Internet Recovery Mode (hold cmd R or alt cmd R while booting) to first partition the new internal drive and then restore the original system (10.7 Lion). Then - after configuring Lion - you can to upgrade to El Capitan.
I have now purchased a USB 3.0 external hard drive and knowing how slow USB 2.0 flash drives are to install from and to, I'm hoping to use the fast external hard drive for both, but I'm not sure whether this is possible or how.
The external drive happened to come pre-formatted for Mac with two partitions, which to seems ideal.
How to set up in disk utility your Western Digital. WD Elements, WD My Book western digital, my passport wd, we my cloud,wd my passport ultra,Western Digita. 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.
Install El Capitan On External Drive
Can I just copy the contents of the El Capitan bootable installer USB to one of the partitions? I fear I may need to copy it as a drive/partition rather than as a file or folder, since it must be bootable. Does such a copy require special software?
Create Bootable Usb El Capitan
I need to ask the experts here without being able to experiment since I'm unable to justify the purchase price of a magsafe 2 power supply until I'm confident the machine will work well. I am able to borrow a power supply only occasionally from friends.
I realize doing an Internet OS restore via Wi-Fi is another possibility but the Wi-Fi I have access to is both slow and behind a captive portal. So for this question I'm not pursuing that option thank you.