Can I boot an old El Capitan harddrive on my M1

So, I have found some data on this question already but haven't been able to find a solution.

I had a 2009 MacBook Pro running El Capitan. Something is wrong with the motherboard and it won't boot. It has software on it that won't run on a newer OS than Maverick (such as Photoshop CS6). Therefore, I still want to use the drive if possible. Minimum, I need to get a lot of data, photos, etc off that drive.

I have a new MacBook Air with the M1 chip. I am able to mount the drive and look around and even run some applications but obviously not Photoshop. When loading the boot options at startup, the drive does not appear as a bootable option but can be seen when opening disk utility.

Questions:

• Is it possible to boot from this drive on this laptop? (I have been unsuccessful as of yet)
• Is there any way to run this drive through another application to get it to work in full such as VirtualBox, Parallels, etc.?

Solution 1:

No. El Capitan is not compiled for Apple Silicon and will not be able to run on it.

There are efforts to run it in emulation software like QEMU (see this post on reddit), which would emulate an Intel CPU, however it is not officially supported.

Solution 2:

No, but to get the data off the drive, you can just connect it and read the files. The filesystem is readable even when the OS won’t boot new hardware.

I would run migration assistant if you need help getting the data back, but the programs it’s better to buy an old vintage Mac or intel based one that can run an OS that meets your app needs or one to replace the exact OS needed.

Used Intel Mac mini are very reasonably priced for the ones that can’t run Big Sur or newer. Great headless machines to run all your old macOS versions and old apps.

It’s also still early days for virtualizing Intel CPU on Apple Silicon, so in several months you might have other options.