To perform a clean install of OS X El Capitan on your Mac's current startup drive, you'll first need to create a bootable version of the OS X El Capitan installer. You can find instructions in the guide. After months of hard work and continuous progress, OS X 10.11 El Capitan is finally out as a free-of-charge upgrade via the Mac App Store. If you’re intention is to migrate seamlessly across from an existing version of OS X then you can simply visit the Mac App Store and go through the El Capitan installation process.

Click to expand.While those instructions may work for creating a bootable USB stick, the OP - like myself as well - are looking to create a bootable ISO that can later be burned to a DVD if needed. The reason I require or want a proper bootable ISO that actually works is because I use VMware Fusion for a lot of testing with OSX virtual machines and it's not an easy task to get the VMs to boot from a USB stick which must be attached to the VM during the boot process. It's just a chore and another step or two that's irrelevant and shouldn't be necessary to begin with. I know Apple hates optical media these days and is doing everything they can to avoid such things including the ISO files most all of use to burn to an optical disc for installing their OSes but, it shouldn't be this difficult to create an ISO (or CDR, whichever extension you prefer, it's the same thing overall) from the install app for newer versions. Again, the info is right here in the thread (at least with respect to me and my requirements): using USB sticks to boot virtual machines is more trouble than it's worth. Yes, it's possible, but it's not as simple as just plug in a bootable USB stick and tell the VM software to use it as the boot device, it's a bit more complex than that.

Even using an actual DVD in an optical drive as part of the physical host machine that's running the guest OS is easier than using a USB stick, I can't say for the life of me why however. I suppose it's just not that big of a deal to the VM developers - it's not a hardware limitation either as I understand it. Anyway, I'll keep trying various methods and hacks until something comes along that not only explains what has changed with the final release of El Capitan but also provides 'the fix' to make ISOs if desired. Click to expand.Br0adband, earlier today I completed a new online tutorial regarding how to install and run a VirtualBox/Mountain Lion/SheepShaver/Mac Classic environment on an El Capitan iMac. Mac word of the day screensaver for windows. One section which might be of interest to you, and which may possibly solve your problem, is called ' VII. CREATE A MOUNTAIN LION 10.8 BOOTABLE DVD'.

It explains how I used an installESD.dmg image to create a bootable DVD of Mountain Lion for VirtualBox. You may want to have a look at it at the following URL and see if it helps in your situation: I wish you the best. Mavericks, yosemite and el capitan changed so that just burning the InstallESD.dmg won't give you a bootable dvd. Also, restoring a bootable usb to iso results in a bootable iso, but that iso is useless because booting is ALL it does. Try actually installing from it and it doesn't work.