Can't install El Capitan.

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Can't install El Capitan.

I got all the way to installing El Capitan, even making room on the hard drive, but then it "cannot install on (name of drive)". Please help.

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.3)

Posted on Oct 1, 2015 8:07 AM

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Answer 1

brenden dv

Community Specialist

Oct 1, 2015 12:14 PM in response to tgrey

Hi tgrey,

I'm sorry to hear you are having these issues with your El Capitan install. Was there any further information or text in the "can't install" message? Depending on what the message said specifically, you may find the information and steps outlined in the following article helpful:

Installer reports "OS X could not be installed on your computer" or "This disk cannot be used to start up your computer" - Apple Support

Regards

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Answer 2

Oct 1, 2015 12:36 PM in response to tgrey

Hi tgrey,

do you have enough free space? Installer takes around 6GB and then you probably need additional 8GB (maybe more) to extract and install El Capitan. /System folder alone uses 7.8GB after installation. You can move some large apps to portable drive to free some space and copy everything back after the install completes.

Note:

Shortly after the upgrade you will actually gain some space. In my case before install I had a little over 27GB of available space, after El Capitan download only 22GB and after installation and reboot I had 42GB of available space!!! 🙂

You may also try to upgrade to a newer version of Mac OS X, because 10.7.3 (Lion) is a little bit old. I guess you could try Yosemite and then El Capitan. If I remember there were larger changes in Mountain Lion or Mavericks, so you may need to do the upgrade through 2 versions.

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