Why won't El Capitan install on my external SSD?

July 22, 2020 7:17 AM

I have an old 2009 Mac Mini (2.53 Intel Core 2 Duo) that I am not using and a Toshiba laptop that I'd like to upgrade with the internal SSD I put in the Mac Mini a few years ago. So that the Mac Mini isn't marooned, I'd like to install El Cap on another spare SSD I have for when I take out the internal SSD from the Mini. However, each of the various methods I am trying to install El Cap on the external SSD aren't working.

Ok, here's the situation: The 2009 Mac Mini has been sitting unused for about half a year. My daughter will be doing school online this Fall and I will be teaching online in the Fall, so both of us will be at home on our screens. The 2009 Mac Mini has a Crucial MX 500 GB SSD in it that I installed a few years ago. I'd like to try to put that in the Toshiba Windows laptop so that my daughter could use that laptop for school, as the Toshiba has an HDD in it and is quite slow.

So as not to leave the Mac Mini totally useless I'd like to install El Capitan on another SSD I have laying around, an OWC Mercury Electra 3G with 120GB of space. I've had that drive for several years, I think, probably since 2013 or '14.

The Mac Mini currently has El Capitan installed, plus when I upgraded to El Cap, I saved the installer. I tried to just run that from the Mac Mini with the OWC SSD hooked up via USB. It starts, checks the external drive, begins to install, and then stops at different points. Sometimes it stops when it has to reboot. Sometimes it makes it through the reboot and then just stops mysteriously after a few minutes of the second phase. It usually has a message something like "The packages cannot be installed. Please contact the software developer [etc]..."

So, then I made a bootable USB thumb drive with that same installer, following instructions I found online on how to do that with Terminal. It has similar results - it can get going and starts, but usually after the reboot, it fails. Doing it that way was insanely slow, as the '09 Minis just have USB 2.0, so it's going from one USB 2.0 to another USB 2.0 connection.

Lastly, I found this link from last Fall in Apple Support - How to Upgrade to OS X El Capitan. I downloaded that installer and tried to run it from the Mac Mini itself to the external drive. This time, I got a screen that showed the external drive as an available target for install, but with it greyed out and a message that it couldn't be installed.

I have wiped and reformatted the OWC drive on two different Macs, setting them up as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and GUID Partition Map, which seems to be the correct settings. I have done this a few times now, as after the first few failures, I decided to keep resetting the drive. I have also checked the OWC SSD via First Aid in Disk Utility and it doesn't show any problems.

Is there something I am missing?

posted by Slothrop to Technology (11 answers total)

Best answer: I had recurrent fails making a VM with a downloaded version of the Mojave installer because the security certificate had expired. None of the failures ever gave the proper error message. It worked perfectly when I downloaded the installer again, as Apple had updated the security certificate. Here is a TidBits link.
posted by FungusCassetteBicker at 7:36 AM on July 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

Best answer: It probably is due to the security certificate issue that FungusCassetteBicker mentioned... Try downloading a new copy here from Apple directly (link is on that page) and see if that works for you...
posted by rambling wanderlust at 7:41 AM on July 22, 2020 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks for the information regarding the security certificates... When I use the newer link from Apple Support that you suggest, it still won't work. I select "Change Install Location" and it brings up the internal disk, the mounted installer, and the external SSD. The mounted installer and the external SSD are not allowed to be selected for installation. When I click on it, it says 'OS X can't be installed on this disk. OS X isn't installed.' After that I went back and erased it for what feels like the millionth time, setting it up as Mac OS X Journaled and GUID partition map, and I get the same error.

Do I have a bad SSD somehow?
posted by Slothrop at 8:02 AM on July 22, 2020

Best answer: The OWC guide to upgrading to El Capitan

As others have mentioned, your security certificate inside the "Install El Capitan" application has expired. You need to be sure you download the full installer, not the update to El Capitan.

Be sure your date and time are set correctly; see this Apple discussion

This link may be an installer with a certificate which expires far in the future. Details here
posted by blob at 8:14 AM on July 22, 2020

Best answer: Hmmm... I'd definitely be wary of the disk, but maybe you could try cloning the mini with Carbon Copy Cloner if it fits? It also might give you some different messages about what is causing the disk issues. There might be some useful information here as well, if you haven't seen it before.

I'd definitely check the USB side, see if there is anything messing up the connection, whether a bad cable or interference from another device. USB 2.0 shouldn't be super slow, it is capped at 60mb per second, and could be an indication that it has fallen back to USB 1.1 speeds - frequently an issue if a cheap mouse or keyboard has been plugged in to the same hub/shared internal USB ports.
posted by rambling wanderlust at 8:16 AM on July 22, 2020

Best answer: Are you sure you're reformatting the entire drive and not just the volume that's on it? Not 100% sure on El Capitan, and this might be more a thing on later versions that use APFS, but at some point Disk Utility changed a bit to default to showing volumes rather than devices - you have to go to View and choose All Devices - and if you don't do that and grab the entire disk, it sometimes does weird things that can cause install issues. That's tripped me up at least once or twice.
posted by mrg at 9:31 AM on July 22, 2020

Best answer: You can set the clock back before November 2019 to run an installer that has these expired certificates (the content hasn't gone bad, just the future came at us hard). If you need to change the clock in Recovery Mode, there's Terminal in the Utilities menu where you can issue:
date -u MMDDhhmmYY
(eg 3004235919 for 2019-04-30T23:59:00)
posted by k3ninho at 10:34 AM on July 22, 2020

Best answer: I have wiped and then upgraded several 2009 mac mini's by booting from a USB drive with an installer. Here's the official Apple support page on how to do it. If you use the Mac Mini to download the install disk image and do this creation - it should work. You could then remove the 500GB drive and set it aside - still a working OS as a backup - and try and install right to the new OWC disk installed in the Mini.

When you boot from that USB stick, there are options to run Disk Utility and format the internal drive.

However - having opened and closed many mac minis of that vintage.... is there any way to avoid this? Those things are a pain and easy to damage. Right now you have two working computers of a certain age, it is a non-zero possibility that you end up with one or more of these computers disabled. I do not mean to throw shade on your hardware tinkering abilities - I think I'm good at this stuff but I destroyed a small-form factor PC this spring with one slip of a screwdriver. I happened to be trying to install a drive to set it up as a school-from-home PC for my kid. It set me back a week.

If you can , I would buy a new SSD for the toshiba and leave the Mac Mini be. Looks like one can be had for about $50.

If you want to go crazy with the Mini, I have successfully installed a patched version of MacOS Catalina on a 2009 mini.
posted by sol at 12:01 PM on July 22, 2020

Response by poster: Hi all!

Here's where I'm at - I downloaded Carbon Copy Cloner, per rambling wanderlust's recommendation. That allowed me to copy the existing install of El Capitan onto the 120 GB SSD. It worked and didn't give any errors.

I then put the OWC drive into the Mac Mini. Powered it up. It started to boot, got one third of the way through the progress bar, quickly, and then just turns off. I tried it a second time with the same result.

I was trying to see if I could get the Toshiba working for essentially free and not leave the '09 Mini stranded. I'm not sure I am going to be able to do that as either something is wrong with the OWC drive or the '09 Mini is giving up.

Just to note - everything that is on the '09 Mini is copied onto a working '12 Mini, which has its own Time Machine backup hooked up to it. There's also a third copy of all of my professional files on a '15 iMac, which also has a Time Machine backup. So, I don't need the '09, I just grew up with a strong make-do attitude and hate to "waste" it.

I really need to get the Toshiba laptop in a shape where I can test it. I do have other options for my daughter's school-from-home computer, but I'd like to get the laptop working.

Based on what you all are saying, it seems like I could make a bootable El Cap installer on a USB thumb drive and then get the drive up and running that way in the future?
posted by Slothrop at 12:50 PM on July 22, 2020

Best answer: If you have not touched the crucial ssd yet here’s what I would do:

1.
Leave the OWC ssd installed, boot from your El Capitan usb installer, run disk utility and wipe the OWC again, then install Wl Capitan again. If something went wrong with the clone that would fix it. You would still have to copy your files from the old ssd.

If you try that and the OWC drive still fails move on:

Put the crucial 500 gig ssd back in the Mac mini and see if it boots. If it does you will have learned that all the errors happen when you try to use the OWC drive and it is the point of failure here.
posted by sol at 5:04 PM on July 22, 2020

Response by poster: Hi! I think this project hasn't panned out the way I had hoped, so I will probably put everything back to 'starting position' tomorrow morning, and explore other alternatives. In doing this, though, I have learned some things and certainly the advice I got here was very educational, as well, so thank you all!
posted by Slothrop at 6:04 PM on July 22, 2020