Here in Belgium schools are locked down due to #coronavirus. With the school of my two oldest kids now switching to remote teaching, I took the time to set up my old MacBook Pro (model late 2008) for my two oldest kids to use. That didn’t go without any hiccups though: the OS X installer refused to install …
The MacBook I had shelved a long time ago was still running OS X Mavericks. As that version was quite showing its age – and didn’t seem to support 2FA for use with my Apple ID – I decided to upgrade it to El Capitan, of which I still had the installer app lying around. I opened up the installer, it prepared some things, and nicely asked to reboot. Upon reboot the installer was ready to install, but when actually starting it greeted me with this error message:
Macos No Packages Were Eligible For Install Os X Download, install, and launch CleanMyMac X. Choose Optimization from the sidebar on the left. Select View all items. Please watch version 2 of this video here: the 'install failed' and 'No packages were eligible for install'. It will download and then try to install itself and then fail with no packages were eligible message with option to restart. Shut off wifi (top right) or unplug ethernet cord. Go to utilities -terminal- type this and only this, date. It will show new date with new time it should be jan 1.
No packages were eligible for install. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance. Quit the installed to restart your computer and try again. I tried using 'Internet Recovery' (Option+Command+R) and a bootable USB drive that contained El Capitan, both of which ultimately failed with the same message. Is there a way to get this to work? Please watch version 2 of this video here: the 'install failed' and 'No packages were eligible for install'.
OS X could not be installed on your computer.
No packages were eligible for install. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance. Quit the installer to restart your computer and try again.
Uhoh! Restarting the MacBook, as suggested, did nothing: the installer kept showing that same error message. Trying to change the startup disk to get back into Mavericks (by pressing ⌥+R upon starting the machine) also didn’t help, as I could only launch the installer and a recovery partition. Yes, the machine was actually stuck in a loop where it would only launch the installer and the installer wouldn’t install.
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With a Google Search Coupon in hand I found that the installer refuses service because the certificate it was signed with (some time back in 2015, when El Capitan was released) got expired by now.
Thankfully one can easily circumvent this expiration by simply changing the date of your system. You can do this before starting the installer, or through a Terminal if the installer is already loaded (as it was in my case).
- In the OS X Installer, choose Utilities > Terminal.
- Enter
date 020101012016and press Enter. - Quit Terminal and reboot to retry the installation.
💡 In this particular Terminal you’re running as root, so no need for sudo here 😉
Here the date is being set to Feb 1st, 2016. You might need to tweak the date a bit depending on when you downloaded the installer originally (as it might be signed with a different certificate). Be sure to set it no earlier than the release date of the OS X version you’re trying to install.
💡 The syntax for the date command is a bit counterintuitive. Choosing your own date will require some puzzling from your end:
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Later versions of OS X, such as High Sierra, have become a bit smarter: they give you the warning upfront – when first launching the Installer.app – instead of after having prepared your disk for installation.
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If you ever get this error while attempting to install OS X, you will likely need to set the date using terminal.The simplest way to set it (if you have no OS installed on the machine) is to boot the install media, open the terminal and check the date (type date).
No Packages Were Eligible For Install Mac Operating System
The following information was found on someones site (sorry I forget which), but I have included it here to make it easier to correct this issue.Use the following command in terminal to set the machine to a time and date of your choosing:
No Packages Were Eligible For Install Mac
date {month}{day}{hour}{minute}{year}
For example, to set it to 8pm on the 2nd October 2018
date 100220002018The command below will output the current date in a format suitable for use on another machine:
date '+%m%d%H%M%Y.%S'
Further, the following (mouthful of a command) will let you specify a date and time in a more readable format and set it in one go:
date -f '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S' '2016-07-09 15:20:10'