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I wanted to do a clean install of El Capitan, because my system was very slow.
So then, I tried booting into the recovery partition, and I got a "prohibited icon".

When I boot into macOS, at first it doesn't boot and powers off, then it automatically boots again, says something about the macOS boot file and then I am presented with the login screen. Without a recovery, I download the Install El Capitan app, and Install Disk Creator.
Before I can make an install disk, the app asks me for an admin password.

So I enter my password, and it doesn't accept it. Just to make sure I was an admin, I head to the Users and Groups preference pane and I am not an admin. There weren't any other users that were admins either. Following some instructions, I boot into the single user mode. I don't know if it is the single user mode because the prompt was Shell>, and I don't that should be the prompt, but I could be wrong. In the boot selector, there is a new partition "EFI Boot", that wasn't there before. Booting into that takes me into an EFI Shell v1.10.

List of shortcuts that take me to the EFI Shell while booting: CMD+S, CMD+OPT+R, CMD+R, CMD+V, CMD+D, and SHIFT

Help would be appreciated, thanks in advance!

P.S. Edits are in bold

Broken MacBook
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  • This is not quite easy to follow. The answer will most likely depend on whether you need the data on there or not. If not, just wipe the disk in disk utility and reinstall from recovery. – X_841 Jan 16 '22 at 13:06
  • It's worth mentioning that a clean install may not be the best fix for 'very slow' performance. Firstly, that's a 2009 Mac. Does it still have the original hard drive? Is the storage nearly full? How much RAM does it have? 4Gb is not much to run El Capitan on, particularly if it's swapping out to a hard drive. – benwiggy Jan 16 '22 at 15:01
  • Have you tried an answer to this question in an effort to get an administrator account? – David Anderson Jan 16 '22 at 21:27
  • I don't have recovery, and I can't wipe OS X while it's running. El Capitan was snappy when I first installed it, 3 years ago. And yes, I have read that post I am and trying to get hold of a FireWire cable. – Broken MacBook Jan 17 '22 at 14:23

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