What Is Mac OS X El Capitan? This is the twelfth release from the Apple software stable. It succeeds OS X Yosemite and focuses on stability, performance, and security. As from the end of September 2015, it was released to end users, free of charge, from theMac App Store. Features Of Mac OS X El Capitan System Integrity Protection. The new OS from Mac is here in OS X El Capitan. Apple's 12th OS release is the OS X El Capitan.Named after a rock formation in the Yosemite National Park, USA, OS X El Capitan continues and focuses on stability, performance and security in which OS X Yosemite started. The Mac OS X El Capitan 10.11.1 DMG is the twelfth major release of OS X providing different enhancements and many new features. Mac OS X El Capitan 10.11.1 DMG Review Among different Mac OS X releases, El Capitan 10.11 is known as a prominent release now known as macOS El Capitan providing numerous enhancements and a wide range of powerful.
I am having almost this exact same issue, I have an old MacBook Pro that I have previously had El Capitan installed on. The hard drive has gone funny and now I need to re-install El Capitan. But the only other Mac I have is an iMac, and I cannot seem to legitimately find a way to download El Capitan. Did you have any luck with this? 下载 dmg 格式的镜像文件后双击载入,然后将「安装 OS X El Capitan.app」(“Install OS X El Capitan.app”)拖进右边的「应用程序」文件夹,等待拷贝完成后,进入「应用程序」文件夹运行“安装 OS X El Capitan.app”,然后一路下一步即可完成系统升级。.
So, you’ve decided to download an older version of Mac OS X. There are many reasons that could point you to this radical decision. To begin with, some of your apps may not be working properly (or simply crash) on newer operating systems. Also, you may have noticed your Mac’s performance went down right after the last update. Finally, if you want to run a parallel copy of Mac OS X on a virtual machine, you too will need a working installation file of an older Mac OS X. Further down we’ll explain where to get one and what problems you may face down the road.
A list of all Mac OS X versions
We’ll be repeatedly referring to these Apple OS versions below, so it’s good to know the basic macOS timeline.
Cheetah 10.0 | Puma 10.1 | Jaguar 10.2 |
Panther 10.3 | Tiger 10.4 | Leopard 10.5 |
Snow Leopard 10.6 | Lion 10.7 | Mountain Lion 10.8 |
Mavericks 10.9 | Yosemite 10.10 | El Capitan 10.11 |
Sierra 10.12 | High Sierra 10.13 | Mojave 10.14 |
Catalina 10.15 |
STEP 1. Prepare your Mac for installation
Given your Mac isn’t new and is filled with data, you will probably need enough free space on your Mac. This includes not just space for the OS itself but also space for other applications and your user data. One more argument is that the free space on your disk translates into virtual memory so your apps have “fuel” to operate on. The chart below tells you how much free space is needed.
Note, that it is recommended that you install OS on a clean drive. Next, you will need enough disk space available, for example, to create Recovery Partition. Here are some ideas to free up space on your drive:
- Uninstall large unused apps
- Empty Trash Bin and Downloads
- Locate the biggest files on your computer:
Go to Finder > All My Files > Arrange by size
Then you can move your space hoggers onto an external drive or a cloud storage.
If you aren’t comfortable with cleaning the Mac manually, there are some nice automatic “room cleaners”. Our favorite is CleanMyMac as it’s most simple to use of all. It deletes system junk, old broken apps, and the rest of hidden junk on your drive.
Then you can move your space hoggers onto an external drive or a cloud storage.
If you aren’t comfortable with cleaning the Mac manually, there are some nice automatic “room cleaners”. Our favorite is CleanMyMac as it’s most simple to use of all. It deletes system junk, old broken apps, and the rest of hidden junk on your drive.
Download CleanMyMac for OS 10.4 - 10.8 (free version)
Download CleanMyMac for OS 10.9 (free version)
Download CleanMyMac for OS 10.10 - 10.14 (free version)
STEP 2. Get a copy of Mac OS X download
Normally, it is assumed that updating OS is a one-way road. That’s why going back to a past Apple OS version is problematic. The main challenge is to download the OS installation file itself, because your Mac may already be running a newer version. If you succeed in downloading the OS installation, your next step is to create a bootable USB or DVD and then reinstall the OS on your computer.
How to download older Mac OS X versions via the App Store
If you once had purchased an old version of Mac OS X from the App Store, open it and go to the Purchased tab. There you’ll find all the installers you can download. Repix app for mac os. However, it doesn’t always work that way. The purchased section lists only those operating systems that you had downloaded in the past. But here is the path to check it:
- Click the App Store icon.
- Click Purchases in the top menu.
- Scroll down to find the preferred OS X version.
- Click Download.
This method allows you to download Mavericks and Yosemite by logging with your Apple ID — only if you previously downloaded them from the Mac App Store.
Without App Store: Download Mac OS version as Apple Developer
If you are signed with an Apple Developer account, you can get access to products that are no longer listed on the App Store. If you desperately need a lower OS X version build, consider creating a new Developer account among other options. The membership cost is $99/year and provides a bunch of perks unavailable to ordinary users.
Nevertheless, keep in mind that if you visit developer.apple.com/downloads, you can only find 10.3-10.6 OS X operating systems there. Newer versions are not available because starting Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.7, the App Store has become the only source of updating Apple OS versions.
Purchase an older version of Mac operating system
You can purchase a boxed or email version of past Mac OS X directly from Apple. Both will cost you around $20. For the reason of being rather antiquated, Snow Leopard and earlier Apple versions can only be installed from DVD.
Buy a boxed edition of Snow Leopard 10.6
Get an email copy of Lion 10.7
Get an email copy of Mountain Lion 10.8
Get an email copy of Lion 10.7
Get an email copy of Mountain Lion 10.8
The email edition comes with a special download code you can use for the Mac App Store. Note, that to install the Lion or Mountain Lion, your Mac needs to be running Snow Leopard so you can install the newer OS on top of it.
How to get macOS El Capitan download
If you are wondering if you can run El Capitan on an older Mac, rejoice as it’s possible too. But before your Mac can run El Capitan it has to be updated to OS X 10.6.8. So, here are main steps you should take:
1. Install Snow Leopard from install DVD.
2. Update to 10.6.8 using Software Update.
3. Download El Capitan here.
2. Update to 10.6.8 using Software Update.
3. Download El Capitan here.
“I can’t download an old version of Mac OS X”
If you have a newer Mac, there is no physical option to install Mac OS versions older than your current Mac model. For instance, if your MacBook was released in 2014, don’t expect it to run any OS released prior of that time, because older Apple OS versions simply do not include hardware drivers for your Mac.
But as it often happens, workarounds are possible. There is still a chance to download the installation file if you have an access to a Mac (or virtual machine) running that operating system. For example, to get an installer for Lion, you may ask a friend who has Lion-operated Mac or, once again, set up a virtual machine running Lion. Then you will need to prepare an external drive to download the installation file using OS X Utilities.
After you’ve completed the download, the installer should launch automatically, but you can click Cancel and copy the file you need. Below is the detailed instruction how to do it. https://jtknwb.weebly.com/blog/best-ios-mac-todo-app.
STEP 3. Install older OS X onto an external drive
True id app mac. The following method allows you to download Mac OS X Lion, Mountain Lion, and Mavericks.
- Start your Mac holding down Command + R.
- Prepare a clean external drive (at least 10 GB of storage).
- Within OS X Utilities, choose Reinstall OS X.
- Select external drive as a source.
- Enter your Apple ID.
Now the OS should start downloading automatically onto the external drive. After the download is complete, your Mac will prompt you to do a restart, but at this point, you should completely shut it down. Now that the installation file is “captured” onto your external drive, you can reinstall the OS, this time running the file on your Mac.
- Boot your Mac from your standard drive.
- Connect the external drive.
- Go to external drive > OS X Install Data.
Locate InstallESD.dmg disk image file — this is the file you need to reinstall Lion OS X. The same steps are valid for Mountain Lion and Mavericks.
How to downgrade a Mac running later macOS versions
If your Mac runs macOS Sierra 10.12 or macOS High Sierra 10.13, it is possible to revert it to the previous system if you are not satisfied with the experience. You can do it either with Time Machine or by creating a bootable USB or external drive.
Instruction to downgrade from macOS Sierra
Instruction to downgrade from macOS Sierra
Instruction to downgrade from macOS High Sierra
Instruction to downgrade from macOS Mojave
Instruction to downgrade from macOS Catalina
Before you do it, the best advice is to back your Mac up so your most important files stay intact. In addition to that, it makes sense to clean up your Mac from old system junk files and application leftovers. The easiest way to do it is to run CleanMyMac X on your machine (download it for free here).
Visit your local Apple Store to download older OS X version
If none of the options to get older OS X worked, pay a visit to nearest local Apple Store. They should have image installations going back to OS Leopard and earlier. You can also ask their assistance to create a bootable USB drive with the installation file. So here you are. We hope this article has helped you to download an old version of Mac OS X. Below are a few more links you may find interesting.
These might also interest you:
OS X El Capitan’s installer includes a nifty new command-line tool called
startosinstall
, which can be used to automate installations and upgrades of OS X El Capitan via the command line. Since you may be already familiar with the createOSXInstallPkg tool that can also help automate OS X installations, you might be wondering why you should care.I’ll go into some technical detail about what this tool does and how, but first let’s go back a few years to provide more (and more) context.
Lion, the birthplace of InstallESD
In environments where Macs are more centrally managed, deploying OS upgrades could be a pain point and involve either a lot of manual work or setting up NetBoot environments that can perform automated OS upgrades.
With the release of Mac OS X Lion In 2011, Apple ceased distributing their OS X installers on optical media and switched to the Mac App Store as the primary method of distributing the OS. Without the ability to simply boot the installer from a DVD, this new installer would need some additional tooling to be able to stage its installer setup environment from the currently-running OS, boot into it and complete the installation in an automated fashion.
createOSXInstallPkg
As soon as OS X Lion was released, Greg Neagle quickly reverse-engineered the process of what the OS X Install Assistant was doing to set up the rest of the automated installation, and came up with a clever deployment tool that eventually matured into createOSXInstallPkg. This command-line tool takes the installer as input, and outputs a standard Apple installer package that can be used in nearly any context to “deploy the OS.” In the docs, Greg outlines in greater detail what exactly the tool does that makes this possible.
This has been a fantastic tool for the Mac admin community: it enables one to, with a single package installer that can be built automatically in minutes, both install an OS onto a bare system and upgrade an existing system, and do it in a variety of contexts:
- software management systems like Munki or Casper / d3, for automated or self-service installs
- NetBoot-based deployment environments: DeployStudio, Imagr
- any other means you can install packages: Remote Desktop, Target Disk Mode, or manual package installation
As a bonus, this installer can be customized with additional packages to install, which are added to the OS installer package “collection” using functionality supported by Apple’s own System Image Utility. Since these additional packages are installed after the OS is installed, additional bootstrapping can take place when the machine first boots, and provide just enough configuration to have the machine check in to a system for ongoing management.
Since 2011, Greg Neagle has likely all but stopped building images and over time has convinced many others to as well. createOSXInstallPkg has enabled many interesting OS upgrade scenarios for managed environments, even if machines are initially deployed using traditional imaging methods.
System Integrity Protection and bless
So why am I still talking about createOSXInstallPkg? What about this new
startosinstall
command? Still more context is needed:OS X 10.11 El Capitan introduced System Integrity Protection (SIP), which impacts systems management tools in interesting ways. During WWDC it was made clear, thanks to thoroughscoutingreports from attendees Rich Trouton and Erik Gomez posted to the Apple developer forums, that the
bless
tool would be one system component that would be subject to SIP’s increased security restrictions. Rich Trouton also has many informative posts on issues and infrastructure related to SIP.bless
has long been the system command used to configure boot targets for the system. It’s what createOSXInstallPkg uses to tell the OS that when it next boots, to use an alternate booter file and to mount a DMG as the root volume instead of the default OS volume, and with some specific parameters. This all mirrors Apple’s Install Assistant app.Prior to OS X 10.11,
bless
could also be used to remotely instruct a Mac to boot from a NetBoot server; in OS X 10.11, these servers must first be whitelisted, and this can only be done from a non-SIP-constrained environment like a NetBoot image or the Recovery Partition. So, there’s a chicken-and-egg scenario if you’re in the unfortunate position of relying on bless --netboot
due to cross-subnet BOOTP restrictions imposed by your network (admins).For those with dual-boot environments,
bless
could also be used to programmatically configure the Mac to boot from a Windows partition, and this is simply not possible if SIP is enabled. Tim Perfitt at Two Canoes has a great writeup on how SIP affects Boot Camp. If this concerns you, here are tworadars you can dupe.Install OS X El Capitan DP{1,7}.app
During the 10.11 developer preview period, SIP was initially announced but it wasn’t clear when these then-forthcoming restrictions would actually ship in a DP build and in exactly what form. It didn’t help the testing of OS X installer issues that over two months went by without Apple releasing an updated full OS installer (from early June to mid-late August 2015). Eventually, a later DP build of El Capitan (somewhere around build 7 or 8) seemed to implement this
bless
restriction that prevented createOSXInstallPkg from working as designed - the bless
command used by the tool would fail in the default scenario where SIP is enabled.As of today, the latest version of OS X is 10.11.4, and a 10.11.4 package built by createOSXInstallPkg works as desired when SIP is still enabled. Of course, today there’s no reason to use an El Capitan OS install package on top of an El Capitan system, and older OS versions can upgrade to it using a createOSXInstallPkg-built pkg. However, with SIP’s supposed restrictions on the use of
bless
, all signs point towards this method being a no-go for upgrading El Capitan systems to Apple’s next major OS version shipping later this year.startosinstall
startosinstall
lives in the Contents/Resources
directory in the “Install OS X.app” bundle along with other familiar CLItools. Here’s its usage statement:Note that a destination volume can be specified. This invocation will also display end user license information in the console and require you interactively accept it. This can be automated by 1) passing the requested ‘
A
’ character to the process via stdin (i.e. echo 'A' | startosinstall ..
), or 2) running the tool using the undocumented --nointeraction
flag.What happens next? The install is staged just like when you use the old Install Assistant (or createOSXInstallPkg!). If you’re already familiar with the installation staging steps, the items logged to
/var/log/install.log
may look familiar (I’ve omitted some disk plist output here to save space):There are some differences, however, between how you can run this tool and doing installs via a createOSXInstallPkg-built package.
Where to run startosinstall
In my testing, I can’t seem to run
startosinstall
from any environment besides the regular user GUI session using Terminal.app. A DeployStudio NetBoot environment and Recovery Partition environment both seem to not have the system components or configuration to be unable to actually start the installation staging process. The process also does not seem to start if invoked via SSH or Remote Desktop - I’ll see a few preliminary progress items in /var/log/install.log
but no actual start of the installation staging process.I really hope that I’m just making a silly error in some of these cases, but I wonder if the security constraints around this tool is also limiting the contexts in which it can be successfully used.
Immediate restart
When the install is staged, the tool attempts a graceful restart of the machine immediately. Conversely, if one were installing a package built with createOSXInstallPkg, the staging takes place but a restart can be done at a time of the admin’s choosing, and the installation will take place on the next boot (although there is a time window beyond which the install will be considered invalid). This at least allows enough time for any finalizing steps to be performed, if the installation is taking place during some managed and reported installation process such as Munki or DeployStudio.
This automated restart by
startosinstall
is actually attempted using an Apple event, which isn’t a “hard” restart, giving the user the opportunity to save any unsaved documents, which can potentially halt the reboot. Here’s what it looks like in an OS X VM where I’m actually running the startosinstall
command:For more details, you’ll want to spelunk the code that
startosinstall
actually interfaces with: OSInstallerSetup
and OSInstallerSetupInternal
frameworks, and the osishelperd
and osinstallersetupd
binaries, all in the Frameworks directory within the Install OS X El Capitan.app
bundle. The latter is what actually contains most of the implementations of the actions that are performed. It’s possible to get a glimpse of other interesting OS installer mechanisms if you’re interested in that sort of thing.At some point this system may fall back to a forced reboot: there is code in
osishelperd
to execute /sbin/shutdown -h now
, but I’m not sure this is ever invoked.Blessed by Apple
So why can
startosinstall
perform these bless
commands, but we (mostly) cannot? Tools used by startosinstall
are signed by Apple and possess entitlements that give it super abilities. Several of the binaries in the “Install OS X” app contain one or two of the entitlements shown below:Install Mac Os X El Capitan.app Download
com.apple.private.securityd.stash
seems to be used for the helper utility to stash FileVault credentials to be used for successive reboots. com.apple.rootless.install
may well be what enables the use of bless
to select the alternate boot volume and custom boot options.Closing thoughts
Generally, the fact that this utility exists is a step forward - it’s an official tool provided by Apple that is clearly made to provide functionality that Apple would otherwise be restricting, restrictions that would impede the helpful automation that createOSXInstallPkg has enabled in many organizations small and large. Photos app on mac not syncing iphone. This indicates that Apple is aware that there’s a need for such a utility.
Several features that make createOSXInstallPkg great are:
- It works for upgrading OSes from 10.6.8 and up.
startosinstall
seems to require 10.10. - The pkg installer makes the solution very portable. Any OS can run the installer onto any disk and it will have its installation files staged. That disk can then be booted on any machine and the OS will install. There is no assumption that the machine executing the installer is also the machine that will perform the installation, as is the case with
startosinstall
. - The context in which the package is installed does not matter, as long as it has root privileges. It can be executed by a management tool, an interactive CLI over SSH using
installer
, Remote Desktop or just run manually like any other installer package. - It is portable enough that it will work in a NetBoot image that includes Python: this includes DeployStudio and Imagr-compatible NBIs generated by AutoNBI. There are no external tools required.
- Additional custom packages can also be added to seamlessly install any needed site-specific configuration on the machine immediately after the OS install, while still in the installer environment, using features provided already by Apple’s installation framework.
startosinstall
and theOSInstallerSetup
frameworks contain code to manipulate these package manifests but don’t currently expose any of that to end users.
Upgrade Os X El Capitan
In its current state, I’m not sure
startosinstall
can satisfy any of these features I’ve listed above. But going forward, startosinstall
this may be the only way to automate installations of OS X on “live” systems, so now would be a good time to begin looking at this tool and seeing whether it meets your needs. If not, file radars! Here’show.