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I got my second hand Macbook Pro Mid 2009 today with the plan of upgrading the HDD with an SSD. I couldn't mount my SSD just yet because the Drive Caddy (for my optical disk drive slot) was still shipping so I decided to do a fresh, clean install of El Capitan on the hard drive and just clone it afterwards. I successfully installed El Capitan and I decided to erase everything on the drive because I wanted to get rid of every 3rd party applications and do a reinstall. It wont let me reinstall via the internet so I had a bootable USB via Windows through Transmac.

Now what I did was:

  • Format the USB for Mac
  • Restored with an El Capitan .dmg
  • Use Windows Diskpart to format the drive then restored with an El Capitan .dmg

and what I'd always end up with is a gray screen with circle with a slash. Any help will be highly appreciated since I'm running out of options.

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  • "Windows Diskpart to format the drive"... as what? It must be GUID/HFS+ not MBR/[anything]. Also it can be difficult to get any Mac that shipped with a Superdrive to boot to USB; some will, some won't. An 09 might just be borderline. – Tetsujin Jun 30 '17 at 6:28
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The dmg file is for being burned onto a DVD. What you need to do is something like this: https://lifehacker.com/how-to-make-a-bootable-macos-sierra-usb-flash-drive-1786853248

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  • I tried it, it wont detect the disk. I'm using VMWare on my Windows PC to make a time machine backup so I can restore from that. You think this will work? – Dylan Villaruel Jun 30 '17 at 3:08
  • You'll still need to boot up to an install disk to restore from Time Machine, if I'm not mistaken. I'm assuming you don't have the OS recovery partition since that will both enable you to re-install the OS and restore from a Time Machine backup (I think; I've deleted my partition to recover the space). – lungj Jun 30 '17 at 3:13

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