If you are trying to install a fresh copy of Mac OS X 10.11 El Captain after downloading it from the App Store and you are using a bootable USB drive, you may receive an error message right before the install kicks off. This copy of the Install OS X El Captain application can’t be verified. It may have been corrupted or tampered with during downloading. This copy of the Install OS X El Capitan application can't be verified. It may have been corrupted or tampered with during downloading. Posted by 5 years ago.
EL CAPITAN ERROR SOLVED: You should change the clock to 5 years backThis copy of the Install OS X El Capitan application can't be verified. It may have been. Anyway, I am still unsure what caused all these problems (and we still haven't updated to El Capitan). I first thought it was the HD, but now I think maybe some other hardware problem. And maybe El Capitan could successfully be installed after I did the PRAM and NVRAM reset.
The other day a co-worker needed to borrow a Mac, so I grabbed an older MacBook Air from storage. I decided to wipe out the laptop’s flash storage and install a fresh version of OS X. I created a bootable USB flash drive installer, plugged it into the laptop, pressed the Option key as the machine booted, and then selected the USB drive as the boot disk.
I then ran Disk Utility to reformat the drive and then ran the installer to install OS X. It looked like things were moving along, until this appeared on the screen.
I created another boot disk using a different storage drive, in case it was a hardware problem, but I got the same error. I figured that the fact that the laptop had been in storage for a while had something to do with it, and it did.
Note: This fix should work with OS X Mavericks and El Capitan. It also worked for me with macOS Sierra, which shows a different error message (“The installer payload failed signature check” pops up near the end of the installation) than the one that appears for El Capitan and Mavericks.
The installer checks the date on the computer. If the date isn’t current, you get the error above. The fix involves correcting the date on your Mac.
If you have a complete OS on the Mac already, boot into it. Fix the date in the Date & Time system preference (Apple menu > System Preferences). Reboot using the USB boot disk, and you should be able to proceed with the installation.
If you are in a situation like I was, and you don’t have a complete OS on your disk (you reformatted it), you’ll find that there’s no way to access the Date & Time system preference when you use an external USB boot installer drive. The Apple menu doesn’t give you access to System Preferences. You have to use the Terminal to set the date and time.
If you use an external boot disk, you Mac starts up into OS X Disk Utilities. You can access the Terminal by clicking on the Utilities menu and selecting Terminal. Once the Terminal has launched, follow these steps.
date
to see the date that’s on the Mac. For example, here’s the date of the MacBook Air I worked on.ntpdate -u time.apple.com
and then pressing Return.Your Mac should now have the current date and time. If you enter date
again (as I did in the screenshot above) the information that appears will be current. You can now run the OS installer.
You can still use Terminal to set the date. Go into the Terminal as described above, then follow these steps.
date
to see the date that’s on the Mac.In my example, the numerical representation is 0719140016. This stands for July (07) 19, (19), 2 p.m. (1400), 2016 (16).
date [numerical]
, with [numerical]
being the representation you figured out. In my example, I typed date 0719140016
. Then press Return.The date should be set. You can check the date again by typing date
at the prompt. You can now run the installer.
I’m trying to sell a 2009 MacbookPro. It’s the model MacbookPro5.5 and Apple supports macOS El Capitan 10.11 as latest available version.
I’ve wiped all data from the installed SSD and had to boot from an external disk. Now I’ve got two problems:
Luckily I’ve found this blog post from Chris Warrick who explained how to extract the installer App from the package:
Now we can try to create the install media from the installer app. Make sure you’ve attach another disk which can be overwritten by the installer. In this example its named „MyBlankUSBDrive“:
The InstallESD.dmg image is missing, which we’ll need to add to the right location:
Now we’ll have a valid installation medium which can be used to start the installer from. You can reboot from that disk and should be able to install El Capitan.
However, I’ve encountered another annoying issue which caused the installer to fail:
El Capitan Installer cannot be verified
Oh great… On to the next commands you can try from the Terminal inside the Recovery OS:
installer -pkg /Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD/Packages/OSInstall.mpkg -target /Volumes/'XXX'
where XXX is the name of the disk you’re installing to.Great, you’ve got El Capitan installed! Apple had some issues with certificates and people found a way to either use the above commands for installation or you’ll have to tinker with your Macs time settings so that the signature is valid again. I would have expected that Apple resigned all installers so I wouldn’t have to use these commands at all but doesn’t look like they did.