Chosen Solution
I have a 15" MacBook Pro Core i7 A1286 (mid 2012) I’m unable to complete the installation of El Capitan. I only have the HD & RAM memory installed (no battery). Other Mac OS-X Versions are installing OK (even Windows). But, when I try to upgrade to El Capitan it never finishes the update. Also, it will not install via USB thumb drive. I have tried everything! I wonder is the problem I don’t have the battery installed?
I doubt any one has done any testing doing an OS upgrade to El Capitan without a battery installed. With that said I don’t see why the installer would care. So lets see if we can isolate the possible issues here: First you should check to see what the systems firmware level is. Follow this Apple T/N: About EFI and SMC firmware updates for Intel-based Mac computers your firmware should be at this listed level or newer. The next thing I would do is check the HD, do you have enough space on it? You may want to run this program to clear out the old cache & log files: Disk Doctor. I would then boot up under an external drive and run from it Disk Utility to check & repair the drives permissions & disk structure if needed (make sure the drive is setup correctly GUID & Journaled file system). Next, I would delete as much as I could so the systems drive had 1/4 to 1/3 of free space. The last thing here is defrag the drive using an app like this one: Drive Genius. Before restarting the system I would also make sure the internal drive is set as the boot drive. Now I would do the upgrade! I should point out El Capitan does do a firmware update so it will appear to shutdown and take awhile to restart. You should hear a long beep tone different than you normally hear. Don’t touch the system! Let it do its thing. In some cases it has to go though the process twice.
Can some one say if terminal you can “battery off” (if your battery is dead, but u don’t want to buy new one) so one can install a new OS X or…macOS ???
