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DatBlueDatsun240z

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 2, 2022
7
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Hello I have a 2009 17 inch MacBook Pro 5,2 that no matter what will not recognize any usb installer I use. Im currently on DosDude1 Catalina ver 10.15.7 and want to downgrade to El Capitan due to sleep wake crash after 10 min. So I had used Apple's way by using terminal to make a USB installer I've used etcher, Rufus on PC and many other softwares and nothing will show up. Just the EFI boot that is my main HDD. My 2011 13inch does this too. I've also tried resetting the p ram and for giggles I tried command + R and nothing just keep booting and anything other than the OG hdd will not be recognized what so ever again recovery and internet recovery do not work at all. I'm very lost at this point and do not know what else to do. oh and carbon copy will not work again will not recognize the new drive. I'm an almost certain that dosdude screwed up something such as deleting the recovery. also the 17 inch Mac has a scary new looking motherboard when I opened it up no none no dust at all so I doubt its the original board idk if this matters though. in system settings the startup disk selector will sometimes detect a drive but says that it cannot "Bless" the drive and then will crash the app
 
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What happens when you select EFI boot? On mine, it displays the boot drive. It might show the other boot devices there as well?
 
Just a wild guess... if the computer is currently on Catalina then the disk may be formatted as APFS, Apple's new disk format that was introduced with High Sierra. I don't think that kind of disk would be recognized by an El Capitan installer, since APFS did not yet exist when it was released.
 
In any case, two Macs not recognising the USB drives points to something being wrong with the drives themselves or the way they’ve been set up.

@DatBlueDatsun240z: A 2009 MacBook Pro can’t do Internet Recovery unfortunately.
 
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