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

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!!!!!(((

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!!!!!(((

check time by going into the Terminal

and type "date"

if not correct set date and time manually to current.

The format is

date mmddHHMMyyyy

That is, month, day of month, hour, minute, year, e.g.

date 030410182014

for April 3rd, 2014 at 10:18

Thanks to all who contributed to this thread...greatly appreciated! Correct, after swapping my MacBook Pro HD for a SSD, the date reverted to Dec 31, 2000 on the original HD causing the error. The Terminal commands outlined above identified the incorrect date and after correcting, I was back up and running. Thanks so much!

Yeah the problem is indeed the date

Fix here:

http://www.techgeekandmore.com/2014/09/26/fix-os-x-reinstall-error-error-occurre d-preparing-installation/

Thank you! This is exactly what was wrong. Issue was driving me nuts! Good job thinking outside the box and getting this figured out!

I am having the same issue, but once I fix the date, it is still giving me the same error during install. Any ideas?

For me, reinstalling Mavericks, I had to set the time and run the the Disk Utility (I repaired permissions and verified the disk). After that the OS download was successful.

This fixed it for me. Dumbest error ever.

hello,

im tried resetting, set date, change hdd but nothing help my MBP 2007. when i installing mavericks i connect to internet and VUOALA !!!! ... try for me is this solution .... :-) GL ...

iMac 2011 same problem.

At first moment it didn't work after fixing date on Terminal. I've restarted it and worked just fine.

Thanks folkes ...

My clock got off because I wasn't on wifi for quite a while.  For whatever reason it wasn't set correctly.  I finally connected to a wifi hotspot when I began the reinstall.

This worked great! I'm giving a friend my old 2011 macbook I hadn't used for over a year and *after* I'd already erased the HD, this message came up! But the terminal solution worked perfect! And it makes sense of course. Apple can't verify a computer that thinks it's the year 2000, before the OS you're trying to install even existed lol.

This seems to be working lol downloading now anyway cheers much respect for sharing your wisdom

I installed a brand new SSD into my 2009 mac book pro and attempted to perform an install of El Capitan off of a USB installer that had three partitions (ElCap/Yosemite/Mavericks). Just like everyone above, it went through the entire install process, sat on the zero seconds remaining screen for a bit, and then failed. Just like everyone above, I checked terminal. UNLIKE almost everyone above, my date and time were correct. It failed with El Capitan, with Yosemite, and with Mavericks.

I did find a solution though! I installed 10.8 from another USB installer that I had. That install worked without any problems. Then I used the same USB installer from earlier and upgraded to 10.11 without incident. All of this is a pain in the butt but I thought I would share this here for any others who don't find that the "date" solution works for them.

Be sure to click "This helped me" if it did!