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Making bootable external flash drive

I installed the installer for El Capitan in applications folder, in the terminal I copied commands given however keeps telling me command not recognized even though I copy and pasted it directly from apple site. I replaced “ my volume with my external drive name , but still won’t recognize command.


sudo /applications/ ...

MacBook Pro 15″, OS X 10.11

Posted on Feb 13, 2021 6:28 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Feb 13, 2021 11:46 PM

When you downloaded the El Capitan InstallOSX.dmg did you develop it to get the Install OS X El Capitan.app

which will appear in your Applications folder.


After downloading InstallMacOSX.dmg open to get the InstallMacOSX.pkg,

double-click on that and an installation window will open, this does not install El Capitan

but converts the InstallMacOSX.pkg to the Install OS X El Capitan.app which 

you will find in your Applications folder, it should be 6.2GBs in size.



This is the Terminal command you need to use, if you do change the name of the USB you are going to use and you are using a name with more than one word separated by spaces you need to enter it in Terminal correctly by using backslashes.


/Your\ USB\ Name


sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ El\ Capitan.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/MyVolume --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ El\ Capitan.app


Would be nice if you are getting an error message to actually tell us what exactly the error says.

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2 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Feb 13, 2021 11:46 PM in response to Triumph1964

When you downloaded the El Capitan InstallOSX.dmg did you develop it to get the Install OS X El Capitan.app

which will appear in your Applications folder.


After downloading InstallMacOSX.dmg open to get the InstallMacOSX.pkg,

double-click on that and an installation window will open, this does not install El Capitan

but converts the InstallMacOSX.pkg to the Install OS X El Capitan.app which 

you will find in your Applications folder, it should be 6.2GBs in size.



This is the Terminal command you need to use, if you do change the name of the USB you are going to use and you are using a name with more than one word separated by spaces you need to enter it in Terminal correctly by using backslashes.


/Your\ USB\ Name


sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ El\ Capitan.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/MyVolume --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ El\ Capitan.app


Would be nice if you are getting an error message to actually tell us what exactly the error says.

Making bootable external flash drive

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