Question mark folder on boot after installing El Capitan

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Level 1

4 points

Question mark folder on boot after installing El Capitan

I'm trying to prepare my Macbook Pro (Early 2015, Retina, 13 inch) to sell, and am having an issue with erasing the drive and having the El Capitan setup appear upon boot.

The default OS that came with it is Yosemite. I downloaded El Capitan, restarted and pressed cmd-r, and erased the drive via disk utility. Now when I restart the mac, the question mark folder flashes. My only option is via the Internet Recovery, but that will install Yosemite.

How do I erase the Mac and have El Capitan be ready for setup for the next user??

OS X El Capitan (10.11.5)

Posted on Jun 26, 2016 11:04 PM

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Answer 1

theratter

Level 4

3,961 points

Jun 26, 2016 11:21 PM in response to Maralzo

You can only sell it or give it away with the original OS installed: What to do before selling or giving away your Mac.

Clean Install of El Capitan on a New Disk

Restart the computer. After the chime hold down the Command-Option-R keys until a globe appears.

The Utility Menu will appear in from 5-20 minutes. Be patient.

Select Disk Utility and click on the Continue button.

When Disk Utility loads select the drive (usually, the out-dented entry) from the side list.

Click on the Partition tab in Disk Utility's main window. A panel will drop down.

Set the partition scheme to GUID.

Set the Format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.)

Click on the Apply button, then click on the Done button when it activates.

Quit Disk Utility and return to the Utility Menu.

Select Reinstall OS X and click on the Continue button.

This should install the version of OS X that was pre-installed when the computer was new. Do not upgrade it.

[Permission to use part or all of the above has been granted by Kappy, exclusively, to theratter.]

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