I have a Macbook Air mid-2013. The original SSD drive had Catalina and was working intermittently, so I decided to change it. I acquired a third-party SSD drive of the same size, and the corresponding adapter to be able to plug it in. It comes from a Windows machine, so when I start booting it starts loading Windows, meaning that the drive is successfully recognized.
I have a bootable USB drive, creating using this guide, that contains Catalina. However, it doesn’t boot, showing instead a circle with a line through it…
Now, using the command+R option in this situation loads the OS this computer came bundled with, namely OSX 10.8 (Mountain Lion). The problem is, this version of OSX is not able to recognize this SSD drive. It doesn’t appear in Disk Utility, for instance. So I can’t install OSX Mountain Lion from it. I believe this is the same reason the USB drive is booted to a circle with a line through it.
Using option+command+R loads macOS 11 (Big Sur), and this is a new enough version that it sees the SSD drive. So I could install this version. Problem is, I believe this version is too new for it to run smoothly on this older device, so I would like to install macOS 10.15 (Catalina) instead.
How can I achieve that? Can I somehow use the terminal in this Big Sur Recovery Mode to install Catalina to my SSD from the USB drive?