I can make a bootable USB El Cap installer all day long, but Google searches return no real answers on how to make a DVD from the Apple El Capitan Installer. Has anyone done this, or know how?

DVDs are too small, not enough GBs. And every Mac has USB ports.

Very few Macs still have working DVD drives in or attached to them.

El Cap would fit on a DVD. But I don't think the InstallESD.dmg can be used alone to make a bootable DVD anymore as of El Cap.

You can probably use the createinstallmedia command to make a bootable flash drive and then burn the flash drive to a DVD.

...Why aren't you just using a bootable flash drive?

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I understand all of that. I'm just trying to burn El Cap to DVD (dual-layer is plenty big enough to do this). I *believe I may have done this when it came out, but the lack of instructions on how to do so with this particular OS makes me think I never did. I have a 24" 2008 iMac that is having trouble with installation and this is the final troubleshooting step I can think of before deeming it as a possible bad motherboard.

Tiangou - didn't see your post before I made mine. I made a bootable USB from an *old copy of El Cap and it failed. Research led me to needing to either get the newest copy or change the time in Terminal before installing. Tried that and it still failed, so I downloaded the newest installer from Apple, made another bootable USB, and installed (I did change the time back before doing so). When it finally got to the desktop, it froze and the drive was not recognized as a boot drive when trying to boot back in. I held the option key to bring up bootable drives and the only thing recognized was the USB drive. I tried clicking it, but nothing would happen. I happened to have another SSD with El Cap installed and tried booting externally from that (tried both USB and FW), but it would not recognize it as a boot drive. I zapped PRam and reset SMC, still nothing. Just a bit ago I thought I'd try holding CMD-R, and it finally booted into the USB installer drive. So, I wiped the internal SSD and tried a reinstall. This time it got to one of the gray screens right after it asks for my internet info and froze. Had to force it to power down and when I started it up again the drive is not bootable, and the USB installer won't boot, either. In your opinion: motherboard?

You might try some RAM swapping to see if a bad stick might be the cause of your problems.

RAM is a great suggestion. Pretty easy to test as those 2008s have actually accessible RAM slots.

I did swap out ram and still got the same results. I finally thought to grab a Snow Leopard install disk and so far it's working without issue. I think there may be something with the El Cap installers. I'm going to put the El Cap installer on the desktop and attempt to upgrade that way. Not sure that will work, but at least I know it's not the ram or mobo.

I had to install some older OS on a Mac, and a latest full installer wasn't available, only a stub.

Trying to use that full installer from the desktop just gave me some '...possibly damage/corrupted installer' message.

So I set the date back in System Preferences and it installed just fine.

I was able to update the OS from that point.

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