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MacOS El Capitan from MacOS recovery temporarily unavailable. When will it be available?

I've formatted the hard drive of my dad's 2008 iMac and trying to use MacOS Recovery to reinstall El Capitan. I'm trying to do a clean install rather than using Time Machine to restore. When reinstalling El Capitan from MacOS Recovery, I get the message "This Item is temporarily unavailable. Try again later." each time. How do get my dad's iMac up and running again quickly? I am unable to find a manual download of El Capitan to install from an external hard drive.

El Capitan (MacOS 10.11) is the most recent MacOS that is compatible with this iMac. I have thoroughly reviewed the two apple support articles "How to upgrade to OS X El Capitan" and "How to reinstall macOS from macOS Recovery".

Can anyone help?

Posted on Dec 13, 2018 11:05 AM

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blazingmike Author

Level 1

4 points

Posted on Dec 13, 2018 3:00 PM

Never mind, I figured it out. When trying to download and install El Capitan, it asks for apple credentials. When I used mine, I got the "This Item is temporarily unavailable" message each time. I finally tried using my dad's apple credentials on a whim and it went through. I must say that this error message was very vague and really didn't provide accurate information. The message should say "The provided Apple credential does not have permission to access this MacOS version." It would have saved me a few hours of frustration.

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MacOS El Capitan from MacOS recovery temporarily unavailable. When will it be available?

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