MacOS – Can you use a bootable macOS USB created on a MacBook pro, to install macOS on another MacBook Pro

bootable-diskmacbook promacosssdusb

So my friend has a 2011 MacBook Pro. The laptop's hard drive crashed and no longer works. He bought a new SSD as a replacement, but he doesn't have a way to install macOS on this new SSD, because he cannot create a bootable USB from his old hard drive.

I have a 2009 MacBook Pro running OS X El Capitan on it. Can I use my MacBook Pro to create a bootable USB with OS X El Capitan on it? So my friend can use this bootable USB to install OS X El Capitan on his MacBook Pro.

Best Answer

Yes, it is perfectly normal to create a macOS bootable installer USB key on one Mac and use it to install macOS on any other Mac.

The bootable installer is not customized for a particular Mac hardware, can be used to install macOS on any Mac that supports running the particular version of macOS.

You can use your 2009 MacBook Pro to download OS X El Capitan installer from this link:

After downloading the installer, you can follow the below instruction to create to create a bootable USB installer:

How to create a bootable installer for macOS

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Maybe rEFIt will work for you too, but be aware of this:

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MacOS – Macbook Pro does not recognize bootable USB drive

The Problem is most likely that the USB Drive was not properly formated and is missing the EFI Partition. You could check via the Terminal by using 'diskutil':

diskutil list

The Result is a list of all Drives and their partions. A bootable USB Drive should have a separate partition like this:

/dev/disk11 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *16.0 GB    disk11
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk11s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS OS X 10.11 Installat... 15.7 GB    disk11s2

The easiest solution would be using a third party tool. You should try again using the Freeware 'DiskMaker X'. It formats and creates a bootable USB Drive with the OSX-Installer in a very easy and reliable manner.

Best Answer

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