I have been going round and round trying to do clean install of any OS (up to high sierra) on my old 2010 backup machine. I want to do a complete reinstall from scratch to eliminate all the old tester programs, test files and legacy programs that I have languishing in the drive.

I have tried installing high sierra, el captain and even Lion with no luck. It goes through the process and then comes to the end and says that it will not load on the drive. I have tried it on a fresh ssd and standard drive. I have made a bootable high sierra usb drive and it all ends up the same.

I can pull the el captain startup drive from my other machine and then it will boot up using it just fine.

What am I missing?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/19/2019 11:02PM by weapon.

When did you download the installers? Apple recently re-issued installers for El Capitan through Catalina to deal with security certificates that expired near the end of October.

So you can either try new installers or set the clock back a couple of months.

This document says how to download the installers and create the flash drive installers.

[support.apple.com]

I followed all the steps. Maybe I got an old download. Will try it again.

i do get a firmware update warning on the first download screen.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/19/2019 11:25PM by weapon.

For High Sierra, at least, you can't install from a bootable flash drive if you haven't already done the firmware update and you can't do the firmware update from the installer flash drive or an external drive.

If that El Cap drive can be installed internally, I'd use that. Make sure that it's blessed (set as the default startup drive) in the Startup Disk pref's before running the High Sierra installer. Do the whole shut-down-then-power-up-and-hold-the-power-button-until-it-blinks routine and you should then be able to install High Sierra on your SSD.

...Also, you should initialize the SSD as GUID/Mac OS Extended (Journaled) rather than APFS. For some reason, Apple doesn't like it if you start out with an APFS volume. Let the installer do the conversion to APFS.

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/19/2019 11:53PM by Sarcany.

Tried all of those steps for a second and third time. Used the provided link and made and new el cap boot usb drive. No go.

Got a warning that " No packages were eligible for install. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance" haha

Been at this for like 6 straight hours. I cannot seems to get any OS version to load on any drive [all drives are GUID/Mac OS Extended (Journaled)].

Got to be something simple I am missing.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/20/2019 12:48AM by weapon.

When you made the USB installer for El Cap, you first ran the installer from the disk image to put the ACTUAL installer in your Applications folder?

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You've got to update the firmware first. I don't know if a USB install will do that; it might....

there is no firmware update available that I can see. It give me no indication of what one it it looking for either

I have run all the updates in the App Store for the operating system I am stuck on: Yosemite. I tried updating to another and it gives me the same message and no joy.

I just want to load High sierra onto a blank hard drive and start fresh. This is insane.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/20/2019 10:54AM by weapon.

IMaybe just install el cap on a drive outside of the 2010, and then move the drive into the 2010?

What I've done in the past that's worked.

1. Pull all SATA Controller PCIe devices from the cMP.
2. Use only the built-in SATA-II bus for boot drive & new OS drive.
3. An Apple graphics card like a GT120 + single display
4. Wired KB & Mouse
5. Reset PRAM & Reboot

(also doesn't hurt to pull any USB/BT cards either)

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I got the " No packages were eligible for install. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance" error trying to install HS on a 2009 Mini, after googling that phrase and following the steps I gave up and loaded Yosemite. I think the trick is to reset the system clock via terminal to sometime in 2016.

Quote
Catzilla
I got the " No packages were eligible for install. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance" error trying to install HS on a 2009 Mini, after googling that phrase and following the steps I gave up and loaded Yosemite. I think the trick is to reset the system clock via terminal to sometime in 2016.

Shouldn't have that problem on a fresh download from Apple.

Are you downloading from some site other than Apple's?

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Sarcany

Quote
Catzilla
I got the " No packages were eligible for install. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance" error trying to install HS on a 2009 Mini, after googling that phrase and following the steps I gave up and loaded Yosemite. I think the trick is to reset the system clock via terminal to sometime in 2016.

Shouldn't have that problem on a fresh download from Apple.

Are you downloading from some site other than Apple's?

That was directly from the App Store.