El Capitan. no packages were eligible for install.

Thank you @golyapple & @jmaiers - mine still wouldn’t work as the wifi automatically connects to the Mac when restarting - so I switched it off at the wall before I hit restart & voila! Left it off - currently installing - fingers crossed!

Thank you all!

All above worked for me today, except I needed to leave wifi and ethernet disconnected once removed otherwise it failed every time.

NOTE: I had to try and connect to a different wifi router to stop it automatically reconnecting (my son was on his computer upstairs so I couldn't turn the router off). You could of course go into router settings and block the device as well if needed.

Thank you jmaiers! I was able to reinstall El Capitan on my circa 2008 17” MacBook Pro (model A1261) by following the steps you outlined. I ran into exactly the same issue Charlee78 did. Forcing the magic date and preventing WiFi from setting it back apparently did the trick.

There are newer instructions and steps available in Apple installer page for use.

• How to upgrade to OS X El Capitan (10.11.6) - Apple Support

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206886

There is a newer installer in the above; this also upgrades firmware.

newer installosxinstaller.pkg package within download site link

(this site content + link was recently updated 24 Oct 2019)

jmaiers-

You nailed it! It worked perfectly on an early 2009 21.5 inch iMac I have struggling get ready for sale. I was not able to make a bootable USB installer for El Capitan even after following Apple's latest instructions. Your date tip save the day, so grateful! Thanks for posting.

hi jmaiers

after I turned off wifi . the go to utilities- terminal . inside Terminal text Box ->it start like

-bash-3.2#.

so when I type -> date 0115124517 and when I pressed enter - NO DATE come out and I am stuck ???

any help

I don’t know how you know this stuff but you’re a genius! Wiped an old Mac to give to my daughter and couldn’t get the da*n thing to reload new software. Saw your answer and it worked perfectly! Many thanks indeed

That frigging worked!!!!! I've been at it all day!! Thank you SOOOOOOOOOOOO much jaimers.

I'm the guy who needs exact instructions. Not to be nit-picky, I'd include exact instructions because there's too much to assume.

For example, one instruction was to "hit restart." Since I've never been in these menus before, I had to learn by trial and error. I was looking for a restart button - obviously since there wasn't one, I had to go searching - then I had to make sure I wasn't clicking on the menu item 'restart" - it's so crazy all these details.

I must say, I don't know how you came up with this fix but with the help of Charlee78, I figured it out. Thank the both of you - Thank you SOOOOO much.

Hey there, I'm trying to run this, however, on step 6, when the computer reboots, the wifi automatically connects and the clock gets reset to 2021. This results in the install failure.

Any suggestions?

When you say "hit restart" I believe you mean restart the entire computer... but maybe I'm wrong here.

Thank you jmaiers!! This worked like a charm with my mid-2009 iMac and I’m trying this dated 02april21. Happy to get the computer working again after being stuck on the recovery screen for the last four hours.

How do you set the date on the machine when there is no operating system installed? Would you be able to share those instructions or a link? Thanks

edit: sorry, found the other posts mentioning terminal commands

Thank God I’m not the only one. I have literally been going insane, as it seems this is the only version of OS X that I cannot get installed. I can install anything from mountain lion up to Mojave, yet it will not do El Capitan. I believe the instructions that you think the person for sound valid and I’m gonna try that right now and pray it works

Thank you so much! Why is this the only version of OS X that causes this problem? I have been able to install everything from mountain lion up to Mojave and in between except for El Capitan. I kept getting that same exact error message no matter how I tried to do it. Even when I tried hooking up an extra hard drive to a different computer. I literally thought I had lost my mind. Thank you for this. I’m trying it right now and will let you know if it works. Is it necessary to disable SIP before hand? For some reason even though I did not successfully install El Capitan, it did create an El Capitan recovery partition. I have already disabled sip just in case. I don’t think it should matter that it’s disabled. If anything I think it should help but at this point I don’t know…

Would it matter if I already have another partition with a different version of OS X on it? If so, I can start with a fresh drive and just do the El Capitan install first, and then worry about partitioning for the other version later