So I will try to be thorough but short here:
I have a mid 2007, 20" iMac (7,1) that I bought recently and I decided to upgrade it as much as possible. I did a very large amount of research and decided to go with OWC for a SSD (240 Gb) and 6 Gb of RAM (maximum for this computer according to OWC). After installing the new drive and the memory, I plugged in a bootable El Capitan USB that I made. The computer booted just fine and I used the OS X El Capitan installer and disk utility to reformat the new drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and begin the installation of El Capitan.
After about 15 minutes, the installation hung up at 1 second remaining (this is by no means a unique issue, as I have found through research) and so I waited for it to finish but it ended in an error message: "The installation encountered an error... Please try again." I tried again, this time after restarting the machine and with the installation log open. The last message in the log, which appears with the error message mentioned above, is:
"... got error in writing to minstallconfig.xml"
To fix this I tried the following (often more than once):
- Resetting the date (correct down to the minute)
- Resetting the PRAM
- Unplugging and holding down the power button to discharge all residual charges
- Remake the bootable USB
- Re-download OS 10.11 AND remake the bootable USB
- Download earlier OS's and make bootable USB's
All of these resulted in the same outcome.
I tried installing an OS using an older install CD from apple (10.5.4) but this leads to another difficulty: the hard drive does not appear at all (not in disk utility or in the system information window with the other installed hardware).
I have spoken to OWC at length and they insist that everything is compatible (TRIM is NOT the issue here and neither is the type or selection of drive, unless the drive itself is somehow faulty). I also spoke with Apple support who are unable to tell me more about this error or give much help. So before I resort to bringing this thing in just to have someone tell me to order a new drive, I wanted to ask here to see if someone can work a miracle.
Thanks in advance
P.S. So much for being brief
I have a mid 2007, 20" iMac (7,1) that I bought recently and I decided to upgrade it as much as possible. I did a very large amount of research and decided to go with OWC for a SSD (240 Gb) and 6 Gb of RAM (maximum for this computer according to OWC). After installing the new drive and the memory, I plugged in a bootable El Capitan USB that I made. The computer booted just fine and I used the OS X El Capitan installer and disk utility to reformat the new drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and begin the installation of El Capitan.
After about 15 minutes, the installation hung up at 1 second remaining (this is by no means a unique issue, as I have found through research) and so I waited for it to finish but it ended in an error message: "The installation encountered an error... Please try again." I tried again, this time after restarting the machine and with the installation log open. The last message in the log, which appears with the error message mentioned above, is:
"... got error in writing to minstallconfig.xml"
To fix this I tried the following (often more than once):
- Resetting the date (correct down to the minute)
- Resetting the PRAM
- Unplugging and holding down the power button to discharge all residual charges
- Remake the bootable USB
- Re-download OS 10.11 AND remake the bootable USB
- Download earlier OS's and make bootable USB's
All of these resulted in the same outcome.
I tried installing an OS using an older install CD from apple (10.5.4) but this leads to another difficulty: the hard drive does not appear at all (not in disk utility or in the system information window with the other installed hardware).
I have spoken to OWC at length and they insist that everything is compatible (TRIM is NOT the issue here and neither is the type or selection of drive, unless the drive itself is somehow faulty). I also spoke with Apple support who are unable to tell me more about this error or give much help. So before I resort to bringing this thing in just to have someone tell me to order a new drive, I wanted to ask here to see if someone can work a miracle.
Thanks in advance
P.S. So much for being brief