Installing El Capiton on an old Mac Book Pro today, I received the error:

El Capitan Could Not Be Installed

Once you’ve done that, here’s how to install, reinstall, or upgrade to El Capitan, step by step: Boot from your Recovery HD partition by restarting your Mac while holding down the Command+R keys. The OS X Utilities window appears. Select Reinstall OS X, and click Continue. The OS X El Capitan splash screen appears. Open the disk image, then open the.pkg installer inside the disk image. It installs an app named Install Version Name. Open that app from your Applications folder to begin installing the operating system. MacOS Sierra 10.12 can upgrade El Capitan, Yosemite, Mavericks, Mountain Lion, or Lion. 'OS X could not be installed on your computer' I'm trying to install El Capitan onto a 2008 iMac. I'm installing it onto an SSD that has been installed in place of the internal optical drive using an iFixit enclosure.

OS X could not be installed on your computer

Install El Capitan Os

Could

No packages were eligible for install. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance.

El Capitan Could Not Be Installed

Quit the installer to restart your computer and try again.

Installed

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.

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.

Not

You can easily reset the time and date by following the steps below:

  • 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.

El Capitan Could Not Be Installed Around

Easy fix, for a ridiculous error!