El Capitan Could Not Be Installed On Your Computer

During the installation of OS X El Capitan on my Mac Book Pro, the install fails and I am left with 'OS X Could not be installed on your computer File System verify or repair failed. Quit the installer to restart your computer and try again.' No matter how many restarts I do it does not install. Also repair does not work in disk utility. How to fix “macOS could not be installed on your computer” 1.Restart your Mac in Safe mode. Safe mode disables startup items, launch agents, and everything else except the bare minimum macOS needs to function. Restart your Mac from the Apple menu or by holding down the power button, and press Shift until you see the Apple logo.

When trying to upgrade from OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard to OS X 10.11.6 El Capitan, I repeatedly encountered a frustrating 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.'

My end goal was to install macOS 10.13 High Sierra. I read online that one must upgrade to OS X 10.11 before upgrading to macOS 10.13 if one is starting from OS X 10.6. This upgrade route did not work for me no matter how many solutions I attempted. I eventually found a solution to this frustrating problem which I'll share below, but before I do that, I'd like to share what did NOT work for me to hopefully help others avoid unnecessary frustration and wasted time:
Solution attempts that did NOT work for me:
I tried changing the time to the correct present time and to a past time when the installer certificates may have still been valid (mid-2016). The upgrade problem persisted either way.
Unable
Manually setting the date and time via the Terminal (see above link) to an earlier date is worth trying because it has worked for some people. Try this time: 1010101015
Could

Plug-in your USB key on a turned-off computer. Start your Mac, press immediately OPTION (aka ALT) Select the Orange icon (aka a USB stick) labelled El Capitan. If it does not detect it after 10 sec and you only see your. I'm running into this problem too. I have spent all morning trying to get a Catalina Mac Mini to run a VM of El Capitan so that I can still use some of my old 32bit software. I keep running into this: 'OS X could not be installed on your computer. No packages were eligible for install'.

2) Erasing my internal hard drive using Disk Utility in Internet Recovery Mode
All this did was remove my data, but the persistent 'OS X could not be installed...' problem remained.
3) Booting from an external hard drive that was formatted to act as an installer for OS X 10.11
4) Booting in the Internet Recovery Mode option to install the version closest to the operating system that came with my Mac (Shift+Option+Command+R).
My Mac came with Snow Leopard, which is not available to download, so it attempted to install Lion, but wasn't able to do so because I had not purchased it with my Apple ID.
System

'OS X Could not be installed on your computer. But I was confident that 11 would make running El Capitan as guest OS a piece of cake.

El Capitan Could Not Be Installed On Your Computer
Here's the upgrade route that DID work for me:

El Capitan Failed To Install

1) I purchased OS X 10.7 Lion with my Apple ID and downloaded it via the Mac App Store on another Mac (so it would be in my App Store download history)

El Capitan Could Not Be Installed On Your Computer To Find

2) I booted in the Internet Recovery Mode option to install the version closest to the operating system that came with my Mac by holding down Shift+Option+Command+R while my MacBook was restarting.
3) I selected 'Reinstall Mac OS X' in the 'Mac OS X Utilities' window that appeared when Internet Recovery Mode fully booted up.
4) When prompted, I entered my Apple ID information that was used to purchase and download OS X 10.7 Lion and allowed the OS X upgrade to proceed to completion. I then had a fresh version of OS X 10.7 Lion installed on my Mac.
5) The next step was to upgrade from OS X 10.7 Lion to macOS 10.12 Sierra using these steps.
6) Once macOS 10.12 Sierra was fully installed, I upgraded to macOS 10.13 High Sierra using these steps.
My MacBook Pro is now successfully running macOS 10.13.6 High Sierra.
Basically, what worked for me was circumnavigating the suggested route of installing OS X 10.11 before installing macOS 10.13. Instead, I followed this upgrade route: 10.6 to 10.7, then 10.12 to 10.13.
I thought it may be helpful to share what worked for me in case someone else out there is trying to upgrade from OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard to macOS 10.13 High Sierra and encountering the issue I encountered. Please feel free to ask me any questions about this and I will do my best to help.

Having a trouble with the Mac OS X El Capitan installation? Got this error message screen “OS X could not be installed on your computer – file system verify or repair failed” while installing El Capitan? Don’t worry. Today we are going to share how to fix this error message. We have two methods to fix this problems. The first method we are going to try is to scan your Mac hard drive using the Disk Utility, and if it doesn’t work we are going to re-install Mac OS X El Capitan through the Recovery Mode. Let’s get it started!

First Method – Disk Utility

Step 01. Power off your Macbook or iMac completely.

Step 02. Turn on your Mac pressing and holding the Command + R Keys at the same time.

Step 03. Release the keys when you the Apple Logo appears.

Step 04. Please select Disk Utility and click on Continue.

Step 05. Select your hard drive and click on First Aid.

El Capitan Could Not Be Installed On Your Computer To Make

Step 06. It will ask you to perform checking the hard drive (Would you like to run First Aid on “Your Hard Drive”). Please select Run.

Step 07. Wait until the processing is done and when the processing is finished, restart your Mac. (If this method didn’t work for you, we recommend you to re-install Mac OS X using the second method below.)

Second Method – Re-install Mac OS X

Could

Step 01. Power off your Macbook or iMac completely.

Step 02. Turn on your Mac pressing and holding the Command + R Keys at the same time to boot into the Recovery Mode.

Step 03. Please select Reinstall OS X and click on Continues.

Can't Install El Capitan

Step 04. Now it will download and install the Mac OS X on your Mac computer. It will take some time to finish the installation process. Hope you successfully install El Capitan on your Macbook or iMac.

Comments are closed.