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Snow Leopard to El Capitan Failure

I cannot upgrade my OS from Snow Leopard to El Capitan. I replaced the hard drive on my late 2009 MacBook Pro and re-installed Snow Leopard from the boot disc. I updated to 10.6.8 then downloaded El Capitan from the Apple website. No updates show up in the App Store. Once downloaded the installation starts eventually requiring a computer restart. After the restart, the computer progress bar only gets to roughly 1/2 inch of progress before stopping. This is after waiting overnight. I tried restarting but end up having to reformat the drive and re-install Snow Leopard. What am I doing wrong?

MacBook Pro

Posted on Jun 23, 2019 4:28 AM

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Posted on Jun 26, 2019 10:00 AM

Do you have access to another computer running a newer OS where you can sign into the App Store using your Apple ID. Then try the download load to see if you can download El Capitan and make a bootable USB?

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10 replies

Jun 24, 2019 11:41 AM in response to slicksleeve

Do a backup before installing, preferable 2 backups on 2 different drives. Download the El Capitan installer and then quit it. You can make a bootable USB stick to install using these free programs which will do all the work for you. Boot the computer with the option/alt key held down and select the USB drive. Run Disk Utility and select First Aid. Erase/reformat the drive as Mac OS Extended 9Journaled) with option GUID. Then install the OS.




Bootable USB Flash Drive – Diskmaker X      Disk Creator   or use Apple’s method       Create a bootable installer for OS




Make a Bootable OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion USB Install Drive



Jun 24, 2019 8:12 AM in response to slicksleeve

You aren't doing anything wrong my friend, however something is clearly going on.


Did you replaced your original hard drive with a Solid State Disk (SSD) or a regular Hard Disk Drive (HDD)? I'm guessing you probably replaced it with an SSD and any off the shelf SSD these days is going to be a 6G/s SATA III SSD and unfortunately that can cause problems with 2009 and 2010 MacBooks like what you are describing.


Assuming you did get a new SSD, you are supposed to use an older 3G/s SATA 2.0 SSD for a 2009 MacBook internal drive replacement which is definitely not something that is at all obvious.


What I'd like you to do to possibly confirm this is the issue is trying booting up your MacBook Pro holding the COMMAND-V keys at power on for "Verbose" mode. This will show you a bunch of text as the OS X tries to load and if you can take a screenshot of the last screen and post it here, that should confirm what's going on as then I can see where it's failing to continue loading.

Snow Leopard to El Capitan Failure

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