How to obtain an El Capitan CD for Mac installation?
Where can i get an El Capitan CD to install, my laptop has crashed and cannot find my install CD
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
MacBook, OS X 10.11
Question marked as
As far as I know, Apple never released El Capitan on CD or DVD.
By the time it came out, the only way they were distributing macOS was
- Preinstalled on new Macs
- Electronically, via the App Store
If your startup disk got messed up, Recovery Mode (including Internet Recovery) was the tool Apple gave you to address that.
Use macOS Recovery on an Intel-based Mac - Apple Support
In those days, many Mac users took advantage of the possibility to make bootable clone backups, using Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper!. Having one of those was a great help if you ever needed to recover.
These days, you can download a .DMG containing the El Capitan installer. You will need a working copy of macOS to open (mount) the .DMG file, and run the installer – so if you don't have any bootable copies of macOS right now, this may be a bit of a Catch-22.
