OSX install on old mac from newer one

[monstahfish]

Hi All,
I've been trying to bring back my older core 2 duo MBP 5,3 after formatting the hard drive. I thought I would put it up for sale and cleared everything but the SSD I installed didn't have the recovery software on it. I downloaded OSX onto a thumb drive and tried to do the command listed on this page with the thumb drive being called MyVolume as per the instructions https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372 but it keeps saying command not found. I then put the drive into the old mac and tried to run the command in the terminal with the same result. My newer mac is a core i7 running monterey. Any ideas? I'm a bit out of my element.

 

[Wowfunhappy]

Which OS X did you download? From the App Store I assume?

You generally download the installer from the App Store to your Applications folder, and then run the command to create the installer USB. If you put the installer on the USB before running the command, that would explain why it's not working.

 

[DeltaMac]

The MacBookPro5,3 (15-inch, Mid-2009) will run El Capitan, at the latest. You won't find that on the App Store now, but can be downloaded from Apple directly. And, it's a 3-step process (Download the .dmg, open the image, run the package installer, which gives you the installer app that you need. THEN, you run the terminal command to make the bootable installer. By far the easiest way to to do this is by dragging and dropping the createinstallmedia command, and the destination drive, and also drag and drop the installer app itself. Makes it much less likely to be hung up by a simple typing mistake, then have to re-type the command until you get it correct. One single missing space stops it every time.