Installing El Capiton on an old Mac Book Pro today, I received the error:

OS X could not be installed on your computer

No packages were eligible for install. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance.

Hi, just to spend my time in this period, i decide to upgrade my Yosemite hackintosh to el capitan. In osx installer popup this worning: osx could not be installer on your computer. No packages were eligible for install.

Quit the installer to restart your computer and try again.

I checked Apple’s support Matrix (it is a very old macbook pro) at https://support.apple.com/kb/SP728?locale=en_GB and it was listed as supported.

After lots of Googling and investigation, I discovered that the date and time were not set to current, the macbook thought it was year 2000.

You can easily reset the time and date by following the steps below:

El Capitan No Packages Were Eligible For Install Big Sur

• Click Utilities on the menu bar
• Select Terminal
• Type date
• Confirm the date is wrong
• Type date 062112422016 (example: June 21st 12:42 2016)
• Exit terminal
• Click Restart

Once the Date and time are configured you will be able to install OS X.

OK, installed El Capitan on a Hackintosh, Gigabyte GA-Z170X-UD5 motherboard. EVGA EVGA GeForce GTX 970 4GB SSC Gaming ACX 2.0+ video card. TP-LINK TL-WN881ND Wireless N300 PCI Express Adapter. Got it to boot, but only in safe mode. In the process of trying to fix it, wiped the disk to try a clean install, but now I can't install. I have downloaded the El Capitan dmg file (InstallMacOSX.dmg) provided by Apple. The expanded dmg image contains the package 'InstallMacOSX.pkg' which should be run to create the El Capitan installer but fails with the following message 'This version of OS X 10.11 cannot be installed on this computer.' 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? I'm running into this problem too. I have spent all morning trying to get a Catalina Mac Mini to run a VM of El Capitan so that I can still use some of my old 32bit software. I keep running into this: 'OS X could not be installed on your computer. No packages were eligible for install'.

Easy fix, for a ridiculous error!

El Capitan No Packages Were Eligible For Install

Scenario

El Capitan No Packages Were Eligible For Installment

Requirements

1. You have a 'OS X El Capitan.dmg' downloaded. (look for them in torrent.)
   
2. You have a USB drive (USB flash drive) of at least 8 GB of capacity.
   
3. All this process will happen in a OS X environment. (No Windows please.)

Happy path

1. Create an install boot drive using the USB drive and the 'OS X El Capitan.dmg'.
   
2. Boot to recovery mode in the USB drive and wipe the hard drive (ALL DATA IN HARD DRIVE WILL BE LOST, DO BACKUP!!!)
   
3. Install 'OS X El Capitan' and have a beer!

Step 1

1. Double click on 'OS X El Capitan.dmg' to mount this in 'Finder'. Once mount and open, it should show a name like this 'OS X El Capitan'. Copy this to your 'Documents' folder (Command + C and Command + V, or simply grab the icon and drop it in the 'Documents').
   
2. Insert the USB drive to your computer and rename it like 'INSTALL'.
   
3. Open the terminal and do this command:
   
   
   sudo Documents/OS X El Capitan.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/INSTALL --applicationpath Documents/OS X El Capitan.app
   
4. This command will ask you for your password in order to proceed. It will ask you to confirm with 'Y' for the actions that will happen in the USB drive. Once it start it should take from 15 to 30 minutes or until it finishes coping all installation files to the USB drive and making it able to boot.

Step 2

1. Restart your computer and once you hear the sound that is starting press and keep press for a while 'Option (Alt)' key until it shows a menu for select different drives. Select the one that says something like 'OS X 10.11 install drive', and click in the below arrow.
   
2. Wait until it boots up a screen of different options. Now click on the top bar on the screen that says 'Utilities', and then 'Disk Utility...'. Once open this menu, select the first 'Internal' drive (at the left), and then click on 'Erase' and on the confirmation dialog enter in the highlighted input name 'Macintosh' and then click 'Erase'. Wait until it finish doing this process. Now go to the top bar in the screen and click on 'Disk Utility' and the 'Quit Disk Utility'.
   
3. Now it should take you to the same screen when it boot up.

Step 3

1. We are ready to install but this step is the most critical one because of different errors that can happen so lets do it in way that whatever error happen we can keep trying to install.
   
2. Click on the top bar on the screen that says 'Utilities', and then 'Terminal ...'. Once the terminal is open do this command:
   installer -verbose -pkg /Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD/Packages/OSInstall.mpkg -target /Volumes/Macintosh
   
3. The installation happens in text mode, so be patient until it finishes. At this time 2 types of error might happen:
   A. 'This copy of the Install OS X El Capitan application can't be verified. It may have been corrupted or tampered with during downloading.'
   B. 'OS X could not be installed on your computer. No package were eligible for install. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance. Quit the installer to restart your computer and try again. Restart'
   Both errors have the same solution and is very easy (and very crazy). So whenever one of this errors happens the installation stops. So we need to change the date of the computer to a year when 'OS X El Capitan' were released (don't ask me why), just type something like this:
   date 101407002015
   or date 101407002016
   after that type command
   date
   to check that the date is in 2015 or in the second case 2016.
   and then try again the installer command in step 2 in the terminal (installer -verbose etc...) and wait until the installation finishes (if the hard drive is not a SSD it will take some time, just wait until no more ### symbols).
   
4. Now click on the top bar on the screen on the apple symbol and restart the computer. Once you hear the sound that is starting DISCONNECT THE USB DRIVE and have your beer in your hand to configure your fresh Mac or iMac.