OSX Mavericks - "An Error occurred while preparing the installation. Try running this application again."

this worked for me too - thanks, it was getting very frustrating- simples

Thanks for the post.

Hello! I watched the video. When my installer is running it doesn't show me the same window that says "OS X Utilities". So I do not see a "Utility" menu therefore I cannot set the date and time from the Terminal. I am installing Mavericks from Snow Leopard 10.6.8. Can you help? Thanks!

I can't verify this at the moment, but my guess is that you haven't gone far enough into the installation process. Try clicking the "Install" button.

Thanks for the reply! I have clicked the "Install" button many times and still get the same error. I tried creating a new Admin account also and that didn't work either. But thanks for the help.:-)

When you click install the assistant should try to setup it's custom boot environment. It will copy some files to the root of the disk & eventually restart into that new system (it can take a while). That is when the install process begins. That is where the 'Utility' menu is your system isn't running inside the installer so something has failed to happen, and you won't have the same menus in standard OS X.

How much disk space do you have free?

What Mac model is is? Is it listed as supported by Apple http://apple.com/osx/specs/

Have you rebooted & quit all the other apps (including the ones in the menubar) before trying the installer?

Are you running MacKeeper or something else that tries to prevent viruses or other software installs? Turn all that off before you try to install. That sort of 'system cleaner' has caused many issues on 10.9 I'd remove all traces until after 10.9 is installed.

When did you download the installer? Can you delete it & redownload it from the store on this Mac?

I get the error message after the installer says my iMac is restarting.

I have almost 850GB free on my iMac Model 11,2 with Intel iCore i3. Running on Snow Leopard 10.6.8. I have rebooted with no other apps running including MacKeeper. I 've been downloading the installer for the past 2 days and have deleted and redownoaded it everytime I retry installing because I heard that the amount of traffic might cause some problems with the download. Still no success.

I will try again now and hope I succeed.

Thanks!

Thanks this worked like a charm - same issue for Mavericks. 🙂

I received this error while installing OSX 10.8 on a system (upgrading from 10.6).

Issue was with the CD drive or disk.

Copied the installer to the local system and ran it from there.

Issue resolved.

All,

I had the same issue when upgrading original Seagate 500G HDD to Samsung SSD 1T in my early 2011 MBP.

The fact is that tutorials advise you to disconnect the battery before changing the HDD.

Consequence is that time is lost for any reason (seems there is no backup battery as usually in desktops...).

When starting recovery (Command-R start-up) the MBP is not updating the time of the computer (probably a task which is done much later in the start-up process). Result is that Mavericks is checking the Date which is much older than what is expected and refuses to install Mavericks.

A really small thing which I didn't found in the tutorials.

Solution is easy:

• Restart your computer "normally" from the original disk (the original 500GB which was inserted in an external box USB2 connected).
• Restart again with Command-R
• Do the formatting stuff as advised in the tutorials using Disk Utility, then exit DU.
• Click MacOSX recovery and the process starts !
• Continue the HDD upgrade as per the tutorials.

Hope this helps.

I think if you go to terminal and then reset the date, then it might work:

1) Open Terminal

2) type: date then press enter

3) type the date you want to reset to and then press enter

first two digits: month

second two digits: day

theird two digits: hour

fourth two digits: minutes

last four digits: year

e.g. 071310442014 corresponds to July the 13th 2014, time: 10:44

4) Quit Terminal

5) try to reinstall again

check the following link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf4TzZt24-M

How do I set up a new Admin? I am having the same problem

Thanks

If you're asking how to create a new admin account on your Mac, launch System Preferences, select "Users & Groups", click on the lock in the lower-left corner to authenticate, then click on the "+" sign above the lock. Set the "New Account" drop-down item to "Administrator".

The details on your system may vary slightly depending on what version of OS X you're running.

Thanks!!!

HI guys, looks like for many of you the solutions mentioned here worked for you, but unfortunatly for me it didn't.

I Have iMac 2011 mid.

Today i've added Solid State Drive to it. Now I have original 500gb and SSD 240gb on which i planned to do a clean instal of Os X Yosemite. After completing all the physical installation properly, i restarted the sysem to check if the system recognizes my new SSD. Everything worked well.

Now the problem begins.

By holding option key i get into boot menu to erase both hard drives before installing clean version of os x yosemite.

after erasing the drives im trying to install clean os x, but i get this error that all of you had "An Error occurred while preparing the installation. Try running this application again."

I Tried changing date and time through terminal like some of you advised, also reset the PRAM.

nothing works so far!!!!!(((