Q: MacBook Pro (Nov 2010) El Capitan Install Woe
Ok ... long story ...
Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Type: 13-inch, Mid 2010
Model Identifier: MacBookPro7,1
Board Identifier: Mac-F222BEC8
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo CPU P8600
Processor Model: Penryn
Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 2
Memory Size: 8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
Graphics Model: NVIDIA GeForce 320M 256 MB
Assembled in: China
Manufactured during: November 2010
I've scoured the net, and spoke with Apple on the phone, so I have tried a good majority of the install suggestions by well meaning people - so if you post a solution that has already been suggested elsewhere on the net - then sorry but you're wasting your time. My technical expertise is that of a seasoned systems admin. I don't know everything and am continuously learning.
Apple's best recommendation has been to take the machine to a dealer. I want to see how far I can go before I have to knuckle under and take it in.
Scenario
Over the past 5 years, I had upgraded this machine all the way from Snow Leopard thru Yosemite without incident.
When El Capitan became available I decided to upgrade. The machine was running slow, and I "figured" a clean upgrade would remove a lot of cruft and junk file buildup in the system. Contrary to what others have said, OS/X does not remove a lot of junk when you delete apps. So, I decided to take the plunge. I continuously do backups of my data, so wiping the drive and starting clean was the plan.
I have nothing connected to any ports on this machine - nothing USB, no external monitor, no bluetooth devices.
I built a bootable 8gb USB installer, ( Create a bootable installer for OS X - Apple Support ) which I used successfully on another 15" MacBook Pro which is only about a year old. Installer worked just fine and that machine runs fine. I have no further access to that machine.
Ran it on my machine multiple times and the thing gets stuck at various places - the ususal suspects:"1 second remaining" or some weird problem about not being able to create "boot cache files" and subsequent reinstalls where it hangs at "1 Hour and 34 minutes remaining".
Thinking maybe the drive was bad, I ran it on another drive, same issues.
The interesting thing is, I took the drive out of the Mac, connected it to my Linux machine, and wiped the drive with the dearly Gparted and made the drive completely blank. Yep ran some formatting tests and the drive seems just fine, no unusual noises or errors. (For you non-Linux people, Gparted is a graphical disk partitioning app you can use on your Linux machine. I wiped it to "clear" without putting any particular format on it) If you want to use Gparted, download a distro of Linux and it comes with. (Recommend: Linux Mint distribution)
OK, put the drive back into the Mac, reboot, using the USB installer, and was only given the installer USB to install to - installer needs a Mac formatted (hfs / OSx format) to install to so I ran the Disk Utility to format the hard disk as the default and voilah, Apple formatted the drive without issue, and also automatically recreated the Recovery partition as well.
Now the machine will boot into the installer, from the hard disk. A peek under the hood with Terminal reveals the installer has placed some 322mb of Base System files onto the hard disk.
Things are a bit different now. Now if I reboot from the hard disk, and when the installer comes up, I select Reinstall OSX it wants to download El Capitan from the net. OK, fine. This method requires an Apple ID login which works fine.
I get the same results no matter if the thing is connected via WiFi or Ethernet - the downloads fail and the install never finishes.
Thinking perhaps the network connection may be at fault - well that's easy enough to test because the installer provides a network utility but even easier than that I can surf just fine with the version of Safari included in the installer. Went out to big sites, Apple, Google, Facebook - no crashes.
Thinking that perhaps my installer USB was corrupt, I had a friend 3000 miles away build the same USB installer using the Apple media creation utility on their 15" MBP ( Create a bootable installer for OS X - Apple Support ) and then they used Linux to make a disk image of the USB using dd, a common unix utility.
They then uploaded it to their webserver and so I then downloaded from their webserver the dd image, and using my Linux machine pulled the genie out of the bottle with dd and sprayed it onto my USB stick and voilah, the USB boots, we get to the installer dialogs, the installer gets the Base System onto the drive but the problems persist that it won't finish the install.
This tells me that the hard disk and all of the peripherals are fine, I can run Safari, surf the net from the installer - so I have to surmise that the installer is a bug ridden pile of crap at this point.
My next attempt will be to get a copy of the same installer for Yosemite and see how that goes. I want my Mac back and running and will have to wait until Apple fixes the buggy El Capitan installer.
Any suggestions appreciated.
Posted on Nov 8, 2015 6:56 AM