Hold Option-Command-R to start up from OS X Internet Recovery. Inside the disk image is an installer named InstallMacOSX.pkg. To get the installer: Download using Safari, and open the disk image on a Mac that is compatible with OS X El Capitan. Instructions on how to use createinstallmedia can be found here:Īs a side note, have you tried if Internet recovery has a different version of the system compared to your local harddrive recovery. The installer for OS X El Capitan downloads to your Downloads folder as a disk image named InstallMacOSX.dmg. Optionally you could skip the usb installation steps all together and install El Capitan, let it upgrade the recovery partition for you and use the fresh recovery partition to format and reinstall El Capitan as a freshly installed OS. Then you can use that usb media to format and do a clean install of your Mac.

Use createinstallmedia to create a USB installation of El Capitan.Go to the App Store and download El Capitan.Install Yosemite using the recovery partition.One way to do a clean install of El Capitan when only having one Mac and a Yosemite recovery partition is this: Without a different Mac you cannot download an El Capitan installer without first installing Yosemite on your Mac.

How to clean install os x el capitan