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A friend of mine gave me an old MacBook air from 2010. I've never owned any Apple products or anything, so it was more of test laptop than an actual productivity one.

When I first got my hands on it I attempted to make a fresh install of macOS (El Capitan) from the clean copy stored in the drive. A couple of errors later I decide to restart the laptop and then... Kernel panic, endless resets.

I tried pretty much everything there is. I cannot access the drive's utility, nor safe boot the computer. I restarted NVRAM and the only difference it made was that the boot sound is on.

I don't own any other Mac devices, but I still managed to make a bootable with El Capitan to restore the system. This is the guide I followed in order to create a bootable from Windows. I used the official El Capitan dmg and a 32GB flash drive. Pressing alt (options) it does give me the prompt for "restoring" the system, but when I attempt to it just resets and still tries to load the same version of macOS.

I can very much see the drive being faulty and/or corrupted and I can certainly spare a few bucks to fix it, but I want to make sure I've done everything there is to fix it. Because I'm not very familiar with the Apple ecosystem I'm at my wits end.

The error I get when starting up: enter image description here

The error I get when trying to safe boot the OS, which I believe it's a different one: enter image description here

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  • Can you please embed the screenshots directly in your question?
    – nohillside ♦
    Commented Nov 11, 2021 at 12:11
  • What do you mean by "clean copy stored in the drive"? My understand is that older El Capitan installation files, which may have be useable in the past, are no long useable today. Do you have access to any other computers that could be used to make installation media? If so, what type and which operating system?
    – David Anderson
    Commented Nov 11, 2021 at 19:11
  • @DavidAnderson I don't know how to explain it properly, it would appear that Mac Os reserves a partition inside the SSD with a fresh clean copy of the OS, an original installation. My first option was to restore that copy. I tried making a bootable from my computer (Win 10) from a guide I found online, using the TransMac utility, the official El Capitan dmg and a 32GB flash drive. But I'm sensing that it's not a proper bootable since it doesn't really show how to recover from the USB. I currently do not have access to any other computer that runs Mac Os.
    – Naiade
    Commented Nov 12, 2021 at 10:18
  • Perhaps you could provide a link to the guide you found online. I believe Lion and Mountain Lion had that capability. However, the versions of OS X and macOS since Mountain Lion normally do not have a partition inside the SSD with a fresh clean copy of the OS. If you had El Capitan installed, then there should have been a recovery partition which is suppose contain software that can reinstall El Capitan by downloading El Capitan from the internet to the partition where installation is to take place. Note that Apple may no longer support that method installation.
    – David Anderson
    Commented Nov 12, 2021 at 10:39
  • @DavidAnderson This is the guide I followed in order to create a bootable from Windows. As for the partition, yeah that sounds about right, since the comment below pointed out it would seem I'm getting the kernel panic out of trying to reinstall from a recovery partition. That's why I tried to make a bootable usb, but... The USB never really shows up.
    – Naiade
    Commented Nov 12, 2021 at 10:54

3 Answers 3

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I follow the instruction posted in the OP's linked article. I consider the official official El Capitan dmg to be the InstallMacOSX.dmg file that can be downloaded from a link posted at the Apple website How to get old versions of macOS. I installed Windows 10 20H2 in a VirtualBox virtual machine, then installed Transmac v14.4. Basically, the OP's linked article instructions the user to select "Restore with Disk Image" from the InstallMacOSX.dmg file to a USB flash drive, as shown below.

enter image description here

I did this using a 16 GB virtual external USB drive. Next, I created an El Capitan virtual machine and tried booting from this virtual external USB drive. I found the drive was not bootable. Therefore, I believe the flash drive created by the OP would not appear in Mac Startup Manager on the OP's Mac when the option was held down at startup. The OP must have been selecting to boot from the internal drive which probably has been corrupted.

I would like to think the best and assume the article was not meant to be misleading. I assume referenced dmg file is not officially from Apple and probably would have worked. However, the article failed to include a link to this file.

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  • Wow thank you so much you really went above and beyond to save this little guy. Reading your comment you gave me the idea to create a VM for Mac OSX so I did (which was in on itself a quite tricky experience). Once I had the VM running I created a new bootable and lo and behold, it worked fine. I managed to erase the drive and cleanly install the OS. So I now have a fully functional MacBook Air :)
    – Naiade
    Commented Nov 13, 2021 at 8:25
  • I thought of your solution before you posted your comment. I suppose I could have posted such as an answer. However, any question or answer referencing running Apple software on non-Apple hardware is not allowed here at Ask Different. If I had posted your answer, the post probably would have been deleted. I am glad you found the solution on your own.
    – David Anderson
    Commented Nov 13, 2021 at 8:42
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Might be some hardware issue causing incorrect reads from the filesystem leading to this crash.

I would first try to restore (or update) the operating system using Cmd+R, if this doesn't work the HD might be faulty and needs to be replaced.

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  • It was my first thought as well so I opened the laptop up and cleaned it because it was fairly dusty. Removed and scree the drive back in and all connections seem to be operational and at first glance, no components of the drive seem faulty. Also Cmd+R does nothing. It stalls the boot for a while and then proceeds to try booting again and offering me the same kernel panic.
    – Naiade
    Commented Nov 11, 2021 at 11:10
  • @Naiada If the drive is "broken" you won't see this.
    – nohillside ♦
    Commented Nov 11, 2021 at 12:13
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In both cases, the kernel is unable to start launchd, which is the master userspace process that's responsible for starting every other system and user process. It's a significant failure. In your case you see two different failure codes:

  • When you boot from the Recovery partition in order to attempt a reinstall, you see error code 5, which is an I/O error.
  • When you boot from the preexisting install of macOS, you see error code 2, which is a file not found error.

Both of these errors strongly suggest a corrupted filesystem, at minimum.

Therefore, my first step would be to try booting from a known-good external installer image. You will need temporary access to another Mac to do this. It will require downloading and unpacking the macOS installer onto an external drive, such as a USB flash drive. Follow the official instructions here.

Once you've flashed the external drive, follow these steps:

  1. Attach the newly-flashed external drive to your Mac.
  2. Reboot while holding the Option key to enter the Boot Picker.
  3. Choose your external drive and press Return.
  4. From the macOS Recovery screen, do a full erase of the internal SSD.
  5. Install macOS.
  6. Hopefully, if there's no (significant) hardware damage to the SSD, the install will complete successfully. At that point, I would want you to take two extra steps:
  7. Reboot into Apple Diagnostics (hold D during boot) to give the machine a cursory hardware check.
  8. Reboot into Recovery Mode (hold ⌘ CommandR during boot) and run Disk Utility's "Verify Disk" tool on your freshly installed macOS.
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