Installing El Capiton on an old Mac Book Pro today, I received the error:
Reinstall macOS. Select Reinstall macOS from the utilities window in macOS Recovery, then click Continue and follow the onscreen instructions. Follow these guidelines during installation: If the installer asks to unlock your disk, enter the password you use to log in to your Mac. If the installer doesn't see your disk, or it says that it can't. Reinstalling macOS is a piece of cake provided you have created a USB install disk for El Capitan to begin with. As you may have guessed, not many people take that extra step. In helping take the pain out of reinstalling macOS, Apple has included so-called Recovery Mode in macOS. Invoked at boot time, Recovery Mode helps you check your. Get OS X El Capitan Reinstalled Select 'Reinstall OS' option from OS X Utilities Window. Reinstall El Capitan installer by clicking on 'Continue'. Comply with the terms and conditions to reinstall it on your Mac. Upon completion, your Mac will reboot. From there you can now restore your backup from Time Machine to your Mac.
OS X could not be installed on your computer
Reinstall El Capitan Temporarily Unavailable
No packages were eligible for install. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance.
Quit the installer to restart your computer and try again.
I checked Apple’s support Matrix (it is a very old macbook pro) at https://support.apple.com/kb/SP728?locale=en_GB and it was listed as supported.
El Capitan Will Not Install
After lots of Googling and investigation, I discovered that the date and time were not set to current, the macbook thought it was year 2000.
You can easily reset the time and date by following the steps below:
Reinstall El Capitan Mac
- Click Utilities on the menu bar
- Select Terminal
- Type date
- Confirm the date is wrong
- Type date 062112422016 (example: June 21st 12:42 2016)
- Exit terminal
- Click Restart
Once the Date and time are configured you will be able to install OS X.
Easy fix, for a ridiculous error!