After I got my new MBP, I decided to sell my old 2010 MBP. I wanted to keep all my existing data on my old laptop, so I decided to swap out its SSD and to put in a brand new one.
Make sure the El Capitan installer (or at least a copy of it), called Install OS X El Capitan.app, is in its default location in your main Applications folder (/Applications). Select the text of. One could also clone the current hard drive to a SSD (Solid State Drive) which would result in no need to re-install any OS, and since SSD's have no moving parts to fail they are more robust then clunky old drives. SSD's will also make the battery last longer since they use much less power to operate, waking up from sleep is also much faster. Example: createinstallmedia –volume /Volumes/Untitled –applicationpath “/Applications/Install OS X El Capitan.app” Adrians-MBP: adrianhenderson$ Nothing loads to the USB. I would really appreciate any ideas as I’m am installing a new ssd on a mid 2007 iMac Thanks.
The process of installing Yosemite on the new SSD was not as straightforward as I would have liked. I thought I’d blog about it to help anyone else who needed to do the same.
Basically I was trying to sell a 2010 MBP with a new SSD, with Yosemite installed but not configured.
Install El Capitan App
- Download Yosemite installation from the App store. It might complain that you already have it installed but download it anyway. It will be downloaded to /Applications and be named Install OS X Yosemite.app
- Create a bootable image from the Yosemite installer on a USB stick larger than 6GB. In a terminal run:
where MyVolume is the name of your USB stick. Change this to match the name of your USB stick.
- Physically install SSD into the target laptop.
- Insert the Yosemite USB stick into the target laptop and power up. (This might take a while.)
- When the menu finally turns up, choose Disk Utility and format the SSD as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with a unique name.
- Once complete, exit from Disk Utility and return the main menu.
- Choose to Install OS X on the formatted SSD.
- Follow the prompts until Yosemite is installed.
Install El Capitan On New Ssd Mac
Here’s link to a video on how to physically install the SSD as well as run the software installation.
If you’d rather install El Capitan on the SSD then follow the How to Install El Capitan on a New SSD guide.