So I’m new to Mac computers And purchased a cheap second hand 2008 13” unibody MacBook. It came with El Capitan installed but I upgraded it to Catalina with dos dudes patcher and converted my hard drive to apfs. It ran well but would occasionally it would crash and restart and after researching noticed others have had that problem with Catalina so I decided I would downgrade back. Here’s where my issues started... Not really knowing fully what I was doing I wiped the hard drive of the Catalina patched version but now I can’t even get into anything all that comes up is a prohibited sign or a blank white screen. I can’t use any of the command prompts to load disk utility and when it attempts to boot it goes to the black efi boot screen and then just goes white. The only start up process I can get to is holding down option to choose my drive but it won’t pick up my bootable USB installer of El Capitan. So I can’t do anything at the moment. Is there anything I can do?? Is it because I converted to apfs? If I got another hard drive would it pick up the El Capitan USB boot drive? Any help would be appreciated.
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Downgrading to El Capitan
- Thread starter Bonyfisher
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I agree with BrianBaughn that your USB wasn't created properly or isn't working. It needs to be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and then run the terminal command to create the installer.
For your particular MacBook, I would recommend using Dos Dude's patch and install High Sierra. It's the last best OS X for non-retina MacBooks.
For your particular MacBook, I would recommend using Dos Dude's patch and install High Sierra. It's the last best OS X for non-retina MacBooks.
I don’t have another Mac I can use Though and as far as I know I can’t make a bootable USB from dos dudes patch on windows?
I don't use Windows so I don't know that information unless Windows has a Mac OS emulator. I'd suggest finding someone local that is willing to make you one or get a copy of the original install CDs.
Getting an El Capitan installer from someone (relatives, friends) is likely your best option. That MacBook model depends on external media for recovery. The original installation disc will have Mac OS X Leopard, which does not give you access to the App Store to download El Capitan without (purchasing and) updating to Mac OS X Snow Leopard (which you cannot buy first-hand anymore). Even if you did manage to download El Capitan on Mac OS X Leopard from elsewhere, I am not sure that you can create a bootable thumb drive for El Capitan with it.
Not sure if this will work but there are OEM Snow Leopard install discs available on e-bay for cheap. Once you install Snow Leopard you can install El-Capitan.
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