El Capitan No Packages Were Eligible For Install

I downloaded the 'app' from the Store on the iMac and restarted to begin the installation process. During the install I receive the following message: OS X could not be installed on your computer. No packages were eligible for install. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance. Quit the installer to restart your computer and try again. Jun 24, 2020 El Capitan Desktop Guides Yosemite Desktop Support Yosemite Desktop Guides Mavericks Desktop Support Mavericks Desktop Guides. No packages were eligible for install: Target Drive for Install - SATA Drive. Sunilzlog; Feb 15, 2016; Replies 3 Views 5K. Today at 9:21 AM. Old rig, El Capitan working but only USB booting. Mac High Sierra No Packages Were Eligible For Install Sierra, High Sierra & Mojave are available via direct links - see below. Testing the El Capitan installer which has a published URL it will appear in the App Store, but if requested to download no longer says 'not valid for this Mac' it now says 'The requested version of macOS is not available'. Just while doodling I put the reason 'No packages were eligible for install.' Into Google and was amazed to see that my problem is by no means unique. Many many instances and all for El Capitan. I shall work through some of those to see if I can fix this somehow. Oct 27, 2019 It will download and then try to install itself and then fail with no packages were eligible message with option to restart. Shut off wifi (top right) or unplug ethernet cord. Go to utilities -terminal- type this and only this, date. It will show new date with new time it should be jan 1.

  1. El Capitan No Packages Were Eligible For Install
  2. El Capitan Not Eligible For Install
  3. El Capitan No Packages Were Eligible For Install On Imac
  4. El Capitan No Packages Were Eligible For Installation
  5. El Capitan No Packages Were Eligible For Install

El Capitan No Packages Were Eligible For Install

Scenario

I got the task to install a fresh OS X (El Capitan) to friend in an iMac 2007 and it's a surprise how can be done. Before I start I assume that you want a fresh installation so make a backup of your information in an external device (or the cloud with dropbox) before start. Some Macs from 2009 and up have the option of 'Command + R' method, but in this case we assume that it does not work.

Requirements

  1. You have a 'OS X El Capitan.dmg' downloaded. (look for them in torrent.)
  2. You have a USB drive (USB flash drive) of at least 8 GB of capacity.
  3. All this process will happen in a OS X environment. (No Windows please.)

Happy path

  1. Create an install boot drive using the USB drive and the 'OS X El Capitan.dmg'.
  2. Boot to recovery mode in the USB drive and wipe the hard drive (ALL DATA IN HARD DRIVE WILL BE LOST, DO BACKUP!!!)
  3. Install 'OS X El Capitan' and have a beer!

Step 1

Eligible

El Capitan Not Eligible For Install

  1. Double click on 'OS X El Capitan.dmg' to mount this in 'Finder'. Once mount and open, it should show a name like this 'OS X El Capitan'. Copy this to your 'Documents' folder (Command + C and Command + V, or simply grab the icon and drop it in the 'Documents').
  2. Insert the USB drive to your computer and rename it like 'INSTALL'.
  3. Open the terminal and do this command:

    sudo Documents/OS X El Capitan.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/INSTALL --applicationpath Documents/OS X El Capitan.app
  4. This command will ask you for your password in order to proceed. It will ask you to confirm with 'Y' for the actions that will happen in the USB drive. Once it start it should take from 15 to 30 minutes or until it finishes coping all installation files to the USB drive and making it able to boot.

Step 2

  1. Restart your computer and once you hear the sound that is starting press and keep press for a while 'Option (Alt)' key until it shows a menu for select different drives. Select the one that says something like 'OS X 10.11 install drive', and click in the below arrow.
  2. Wait until it boots up a screen of different options. Now click on the top bar on the screen that says 'Utilities', and then 'Disk Utility...'. Once open this menu, select the first 'Internal' drive (at the left), and then click on 'Erase' and on the confirmation dialog enter in the highlighted input name 'Macintosh' and then click 'Erase'. Wait until it finish doing this process. Now go to the top bar in the screen and click on 'Disk Utility' and the 'Quit Disk Utility'.
  3. Now it should take you to the same screen when it boot up.

El Capitan No Packages Were Eligible For Install On Imac

Step 3

Packages

El Capitan No Packages Were Eligible For Installation

  1. We are ready to install but this step is the most critical one because of different errors that can happen so lets do it in way that whatever error happen we can keep trying to install.
  2. Click on the top bar on the screen that says 'Utilities', and then 'Terminal ...'. Once the terminal is open do this command:
    installer -verbose -pkg /Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD/Packages/OSInstall.mpkg -target /Volumes/Macintosh
  3. The installation happens in text mode, so be patient until it finishes. At this time 2 types of error might happen:
    A. 'This copy of the Install OS X El Capitan application can't be verified. It may have been corrupted or tampered with during downloading.'
    B. 'OS X could not be installed on your computer. No package were eligible for install. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance. Quit the installer to restart your computer and try again. Restart'
    Both errors have the same solution and is very easy (and very crazy). So whenever one of this errors happens the installation stops. So we need to change the date of the computer to a year when 'OS X El Capitan' were released (don't ask me why), just type something like this:
    date 101407002015
    or
    date 101407002016
    after that type command
    date
    to check that the date is in 2015 or in the second case 2016.
    and then try again the installer command in step 2 in the terminal (installer -verbose etc...) and wait until the installation finishes (if the hard drive is not a SSD it will take some time, just wait until no more ### symbols).
  4. Now click on the top bar on the screen on the apple symbol and restart the computer. Once you hear the sound that is starting DISCONNECT THE USB DRIVE and have your beer in your hand to configure your fresh Mac or iMac.

Here in Belgium schools are locked down due to #coronavirus. With the school of my two oldest kids now switching to remote teaching, I took the time to set up my old MacBook Pro (model late 2008) for my two oldest kids to use. That didn’t go without any hiccups though: the OS X installer refused to install …

The MacBook I had shelved a long time ago was still running OS X Mavericks. As that version was quite showing its age – and didn’t seem to support 2FA for use with my Apple ID – I decided to upgrade it to El Capitan, of which I still had the installer app lying around. I opened up the installer, it prepared some things, and nicely asked to reboot. Upon reboot the installer was ready to install, but when actually starting it greeted me with this error message:

OS X could not be installed on your computer.

No packages were eligible for install. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance. Quit the installer to restart your computer and try again.

Uhoh! Restarting the MacBook, as suggested, did nothing: the installer kept showing that same error message. Trying to change the startup disk to get back into Mavericks (by pressing ⌥+R upon starting the machine) also didn’t help, as I could only launch the installer and a recovery partition. Yes, the machine was actually stuck in a loop where it would only launch the installer and the installer wouldn’t install.

~

With a Google Search Coupon in hand I found that the installer refuses service because the certificate it was signed with (some time back in 2015, when El Capitan was released) got expired by now.

Thankfully one can easily circumvent this expiration by simply changing the date of your system. You can do this before starting the installer, or through a Terminal if the installer is already loaded (as it was in my case).

  1. In the OS X Installer, choose Utilities > Terminal.
  2. Enter date 020101012016 and press Enter.
  3. Quit Terminal and reboot to retry the installation.

💡 In this particular Terminal you’re running as root, so no need for sudo here 😉

Here the date is being set to Feb 1st, 2016. You might need to tweak the date a bit depending on when you downloaded the installer originally (as it might be signed with a different certificate). Be sure to set it no earlier than the release date of the OS X version you’re trying to install.

💡 The syntax for the date command is a bit counterintuitive. Choosing your own date will require some puzzling from your end:

Eligible

~

Later versions of OS X, such as High Sierra, have become a bit smarter: they give you the warning upfront – when first launching the Installer.app – instead of after having prepared your disk for installation.

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El Capitan No Packages Were Eligible For Install

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