Chosen Solution
I have a 2009 polycarbonate macbook i installed el capitan on an ssd and used catalina patcher, after some time i removed the ssd and put in Some other hdd and made a el capitan bootable drive with transmac and when booting the macbook while pressing option key it doesn’t show the usb in the options Even tried uubyte and balena etcher but same result I don’t have any other mac except the same macbook’s mac os 10.5 drive which works only that bootable drive was not readed which i made from windows The catalina patcher drive i made from macbook was showing properly.
I’ve never had great success using TransMac the few times I played around with it. Often the issue is the format of the drive is not correct for a bootable drive. So you first needed to reformat the drive to GUID with a journaled file system. That way the boot sectors are setup correctly for OS-X. The second issue is using the proper OS that the system was designed to support vs what you desire. So if you have an Early 2009 the highest version is OS-X El Capitan (10.11.x) the Late 2009 macOS Sierra (10.12.x) Which then can be upgraded to macOS High Sierra (10.13.x) but only after its running macOS 10.12. Frankly I don’t recommend doing that as High Sierra is not very good. To get the older versions go here How to get old versions of macOS OK you’ll need to put back your working SSD drive into the system so you can prep up your replacement drive you’ll also need a SATA to USB adapter cable like this one SATA to USB Cable so you can connect your new drive into your system to prep it directly with the proper OS I’ve listed above. Once done you should be able to swap out your SSD for the other drive. Now your desire to run High Sierra, Mojave Catalina or newer While its fun to push the limits of the system there is a point its not worth the risks and here your systems limits also come to play as CPU is only a Core 2 Duo and only has a max of 6 GB (early) and 8 GB (late) and the SATA port is only SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) so its performance also limits you with your slower HDD you are putting planning to put in. I strongly recommend you stick with the limits Apple set for this series as its reasonable. Best to find another newer system (used?) which offers a Core i5/i7 which is designed to support the OS you want to play with. With the M1’s now out many used systems should be popping up on the market.
