Re-installing El Capitan on a early 2015 MacBook Air

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Re-installing El Capitan on a early 2015 MacBook Air

I recently decided to get my wife a new MacBook Air. I had decided to trade in her old early 2015 MacBook Air and erased everything off of the hard drive. Now my wife informs me that she wants to sell it to a friend for the same trade in value. I am not having any luck re-installing El Capitan. I start it up in recovery mode. When the window comes up for me to select what to do, I select re-install OS X. It goes through the process of checking with Apple to see if it is authorized. Then a window comes up asking where to install El Capitan. But there is no location shown, no hard drive - it's just blank. I've tried all the above several times and get the same result. How can I install an operating system on this MacBook Air?

MacBook Air

Posted on Feb 12, 2022 12:09 PM

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HWTech

Level 9

56,210 points

Feb 12, 2022 4:57 PM in response to Heatherdowns

You need to launch Disk Utility and erase the whole physical SSD as GUID partition and MacOS Extended (Journaled) since El Capitan does not properly recognize the newer drive layout and APFS file system used by macOS 10.13+.

Or does this MBAir contain a third party SSD? If so, then you must install macOS 10.13+ since older versions of macOS do not have the necessary NVMe driver required to use a third party SSD which are usually NVMe based SSDs.

Regardless, you really should be installing the most recent version of macOS that is supported by that laptop which is macOS 12.x Monterey. You can access the macOS 12.x Monterey online installer by booting into Internet Recovery Mode using Command + Option + R), or you can create a bootable macOS 12.x Monterey USB installer. Sometimes a Mac will only boot into the online installer for the OS which originally shipped with the Mac from the factory, so when this happens you will need to use the bootable macOS USB installer to install later versions of macOS.

FYI, here is what Apple suggests doing when selling an old Mac so that you disassociate any online accounts and AppleIDs from this Mac (if the laptop uses a third party SSD, then you will need to be sure to boot a macOS 10.13+ installer):

What to do before you sell, give away, or trade in your Mac - Apple Support

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Re-installing El Capitan on a early 2015 MacBook Air

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