Having thought my 2009 Macbook Pro 5,3 was dead I bought a MacBook Air a couple of years ago. Started giving the parts of the Macbook Pro away to friends. As my father suddenly needed a new laptop and being a sustainability freak I decided to try to fix the Macbook Pro, cause as far as I could remembered it was quite a strong laptop that with windows on, could go another 10 years for sure.
Everything went well, but I couldn't find the Lion CD it came with (I assume. It might just had a recovery partition which explains why I couldn't find any recovery CD).
I don't understand why apple has made it so difficult to create a bootable recovery USB stick. You can download any MacOS till as back as Lion from here, but they are installation executables for an already functioning MacOS! I didn't have that. I had a MacBook Pro with an empty hard disk. I found a way to create a bootable disk with those, but it could only happen on a Macbook with MacOS no newer than Sierra. Not even High Sierra. My Macbook Air is already on MacOS Sonoma!
After a couple of days searching and trying things I managed to create a bootable USB stick with El Capitan on it. Why El Capitan? That's the latest MacOS installable on a Macbook Pro 5,3. And spoiler alert, Safari (and some other things) are already useless on it. So I'm installing windows before giving it to my father. I remember it used to make weird noises when it was running Windows (whereas on MacOS it's completely silent), but old MacOSs are pretty useless.
1) The only bootable DMG I found to "burn" my USB stick with was on this site.
2) Since UUByte is not free of charge and its trial version is practically useless, I burned it into my USB stick with Balena Etcher.
3) Since I don't trust UUByte, I replaced the Installation executable in the USB stick with this one. You'll ask me now, if you had the Installation executable, why didn't you use it with this to create the USB stick without a bootable DMG or Balena Etcher? I tried. The command was failing for me. Perhaps you can do it only on a pre-High Sierra Macbook only. Or there's something fishy about that isntallation executable too.
4) After the USB stick was created I had to "fix" with Disk Utility so that I can extend one of its partition to 16GB. The problem with Balena Etscher is that it creates a partition as big as the data. Which means your USB stick will not be able to boot, cause it needs some extra space to extract and run the Installer.
5) I finally managed to boot from the USB stick (by pressing the Option key during startup) and went some steps further, but as soon as the actual installation started I was getting an error that the installation is corrupted. Which wasn't true. The date of my laptop was reset to 2000 for some reason (good work there Apple developers with your error messages... #onejob). Luckily I had seen somewhere in my research that this is a typical error you get in this process and a fix for it. On top of your screen you see a menu called Utilities. Click it and choose Terminal. If Utilities menu feels unclicable, it's because your're somewhere in a MacOS 90s style where everything is very basic and impractical. You might have to close a window or choose an option on your current window before the Utilities menu becomes clicable. If you do it as soon as you boot up your USB stick and before you start your installation probably it will work immediately. When the Terminal starts up, type "date" and press enter to check if your MacBook's date is indeed in 2000. If it is you can use the command "date MMDDHHMMYY" to fix it, where MM is the month (so 01 for january), DD is the date, HH is the hour (in 24-hour format) MM is the minutes and YY are the last two digits of the year we're in. That's some god damn date/time format by the way. I'll never understand why Americans are so fucked up when it comes to dates and units of measurement...
6) Close the terminal and perform the installtion. It takes long (it might even get stuck at 0 minutes left for quite some time - but it will complete eventually). Even after start up it can take long to boot. But eventually it will succeed. If asked to connect to the iCloud, don't do that yet.
7) Failing to create a bootable USB with the executable I downloaded from Archive.org using the terminal command method didn't give me confidence that file was not tampered with. So now that I had a working El Capitan macbook, I decided to create another USB stick using only Apple resources and redo the whole installation. So I downloaded the installation DMG (non-bootable) into my MacBook Pro from here and ran it so that the installer is copied to the Applications folder. That step fails on modern MacOSs, but since I'm now on El Capitan, it works. Then, without running it, I use the terminal command for El Capitan I found here to created a bootable installation USB stick (after I formated with Disk Utility to make sure all traces of unreliable installer is gone).
8) I restarted the Macbook and pressed the Option key again to start up from the USB stick instead of the hard disk. Once the installer was loaded, the first thing I did was using the Disk Utility to wipe out my Macintosh HD with the possibly infected MacOS. Then I performed the installation of El Capitan all over again (this time it's safe enough to log into your iCloud - but you can still choose to do it later).
Voilà! Your Macbook Pro El Capitan is restored. And there is now even a recovery partition in it. But keep that recovery stick just in case too ;)
No comments:
Post a Comment