Can't install el capitan on my Early 2008 MBP

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Can't install el capitan on my Early 2008 MBP

I'm experiencing a strangle occurrence and google has been little to no help to me, I have 2 gen 1 MBP's that both are supposed to be capable of running 10.11 but fail during the installation. I've followed the same steps on each machine and get the same result. I start with formatting the HDD, installing Yosemite via a USB stick followed by success, make it to the app store to download el capitan and that goes fine, but it falls apart during the installation. The app launches fine and restarts the computer as it should but then this happens: It installs very slow and each time it hits around the 5 minute mark it gives me a general error and a crash log. I've tried re-installing the OS via recovery multiple times and I've confirmed both machines to have the most recent firmware. Both machines do NOT have batteries installed but I fail to see how not having a battery installed would inhibit an OS installation, certiantley didnt with Yosemite! Anyways I've spent too many hours working on this (i'm posting this at 3 in the morning!) and I'm hoping someone here can tell me what I'm doing wrong, this is the closest I've come to owning a modern apple computer and I really want this to work out, any advice would be appreciated.

MacBook Pro, OS X 10.10

Posted on Jul 3, 2019 12:18 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Toasty Costanza Author

Level 1

8 points

Jul 4, 2019 11:20 PM in response to Toasty Costanza

Alright guys, i've determined el capitan just hates me and there is literally no actual reason why it is not installing. Going off the basis that yosemite worked i kinda figured YA KNOW, WHY NOT HIGH SIERRA! So yeah 10.13 works just fine so I guess this story has concluded. To the people who get into the same position as I, consider dosdude's alternative.

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Answer 2

Eric Root

Level 10

684,609 points

Jul 3, 2019 9:59 AM in response to Toasty Costanza

After it crashes, have you tried shutting down the computer with the power button and then restarting? Sometimes that will restart the installer.

Have you tried installing after booting into another admin account or the Safe Mode?

Safe Mode - About

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Answer 3

Eric Root

Level 10

684,609 points

Jul 3, 2019 7:26 PM in response to Toasty Costanza

After getting the computer running on Yosemite, have you considered downloading El Capitan, quitting the installer, then making an El Capitan bootable USB. Boot from the USB, erase/reformat the drive and try a clean install of El Capitan?

You can make a bootable USB stick to install using these free programs which will do all the work for you.

Bootable USB Flash Drive – Diskmaker X Disk Creator or use Apple’s method Create a bootable installer for OS

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Answer 4

HWTech

Level 9

60,602 points

Jul 3, 2019 7:48 PM in response to Toasty Costanza

Have you tried creating an El Capitan USB installer?

I wonder if you are missing a firmware update. Check to see if your EFI & SMC firmware is up to date by checking here. While Apple used to provide firmware updaters separately, a lot of times they required a specific version of OSX to actually run.

Perhaps you have a failing hard drive. You can check the drive's health using DriveDX. If the drive reports as healthy, then post the DriveDX report here as some health indicators (aka SMART Attributes) will better show the actual condition of the drive.

Have you tried installing El Capitan to an external drive? You may need to keep a Mac formatted drive installed internally as well. Perhaps the hard drive cable has an issue and installing to an external drive will eliminate it as a potential issue.

Is the laptop plugged into a working power adapter?

Are there any clues in the install and crash logs?

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Answer 5

Jul 3, 2019 4:36 PM in response to Eric Root

After multiple retries and multiple hard drive formats and re-installs, i've still gotten nowhere. I attempted booting into safe and got no where, its strange because its a fact that these machines can run el capitan yet both of mine which i've confirmed to be working under Yosemite both do the same thing, crash during the installation and refuse to make progress. I did some further research and found some others are experiencing this as well and some people got results by taking their MBPs to a genius bar but those aren't accessible to me unfortunately. I've considered running High Sierra on the early 08' using dosdude's patcher but I have a suspicion that doing so will kill any performance I can get out of this 11 year old machine. I have a windows machine that I can create boot usb's with if thats any help as I'm starting to think grabbing el capitan from the app store aint gonna do the trick this time around.

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Answer 6

Jul 3, 2019 7:52 PM in response to HWTech

I've confirmed the firmware to be up to date and the harddrive shows no signs of failure, heck it made it through the yosemite installation multiple times. I had a friend look at the crash logs and he pointed out the following:

error code: 0x02000170

URL:file:///var/root/Downloads/ with error Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=260 "The file couldn’t be opened because it doesn’t exist."

He also linked me to a dmg of el crapitan and im going to make a boot usb pretty soon, ill update this form after.

I appreciate the help from everyone.

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Can't install el capitan on my Early 2008 MBP

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