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So I dug up my old MacBook Pro, It previously had El Capitan running on it.

The el Capitan was kind of getting slow, so I opted for making a factory reset(Erase mackintosh HD).

Now I am trying to boot from a USB flash drive that I created in TransMac, however when I use the alt boot, it doesn't show up in the bootable drives. It does however show up in the Disk Utility when I boot with CMD + R.

Tried clearing PRAM,NVRAM,SMC.

Why in god's name should such a straightforward task take me 5+ hours to unsuccessfully troubleshoot, whereas it takes me 3 minutes on a regular windows PC to setup.

Anyway, suggestions are more than helpful.

Edit: I also tried the reinstall OS X option from the CMD + R menu, although I get stuck there since apparently my appleid has not been tied with the el Capitan that was previously on the system.

Crimson
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  • At this point I feel like, the only viable option is to wait around and pray someone from my relatives happens to have El Capitan on their MacBook Pro installed and they kindly give me the credentials to their appleid? – Crimson Sep 13 '20 at 18:18
  • Have a look at https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/309399/how-can-i-download-an-older-version-of-os-x-macos & see if that helps get a copy of El Cap. I can't help with TransMac, never needed it, but lots of people say it hasn't worked for them. refs: https://apple.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&q=transmac – Tetsujin Sep 13 '20 at 18:28
  • If you wipe the HD and then install there should be no prompt for an old AppleID as there is nothing on the hard drive to point to it. Also any way of creating a macOS installer that doesn't use macOS is gonna be problematic. Beg or borrow a Mac to create the install media and either use the terminal command to create the media or (my preference) DiskMakerX. The problem is not the Mac its the software you used to create the install media. – Steve Chambers Sep 13 '20 at 19:29
  • Gotchya! Thanks for the contributions you 2! – Crimson Sep 13 '20 at 19:30
  • Wish you luck:) BTW, in comparison to Windows, your fail-point is actually very similar… you need Windows to download & make the boot/install USB. At least on Mac (unfortunately for you right now, two years after your Mac was made) Apple introduced Internet Recovery - so if you ever need to reinstall the OS onto even a totally blank machine, you can do it right from that Mac itself, so long as you have an internet connection. Makes things very easy these days. – Tetsujin Sep 14 '20 at 11:28

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