Unable to reinstall macOS El Capitan

[Aldebaron]

Hello,

I am currently on Big Sur. I'm having update issues that are making me pretty pissed off. I can only update my MacBook in Safe Mode. : mad:
I was advised to reinstall my OS X. But there you go, my disk is not found. It's so mysterious.
Encrypted APFS disk. OS X 10.11 and currently I'm on Big Sur. I made command + shift + alt + R
I thank you in advance

 

[MBAir2010]

what year is the MacBook?
you could restart press the option or R key for better options

there will be a flood of advice soon.....

edit
did you ever make a time machine back up of an OSX that works?
if so
plug that in
press option on restart (after the chime before the apple logo)
that will get you back to what ever you liked previously

 

[fisherking]

are you running the betas? and is that the only issue, that you have to update in safe mode? more info would help...

i've had to run some of the updates in safe mode, but it's not a big deal, as it works... and i get back to what i need to do.

or are there other issues?

 

[loby]

If your Mac is able to install MacOS El Capitan, but it tells you that it is unable to install on your system, what I had to do is put back the date to 2016 and then try to install and it worked for me. I have a Mac mini 2009 late that was the last OS that Apple says can be installed, but it would not. Doing that allowed it to install and then I set the date back to the current. There might be another method, but this is all I have found that works.

 

[buckrock]

Hello,

I am currently on Big Sur. I'm having update issues that are making me pretty pissed off. I can only update my MacBook in Safe Mode. : mad:
I was advised to reinstall my OS X. But there you go, my disk is not found. It's so mysterious.
Encrypted APFS disk. OS X 10.11 and currently I'm on Big Sur. I made command + shift + alt + R
I thank you in advance

Read this discussion. I think you need to have HFS+, not APFS for El Capitan. I'd download a new copy of El Capitan installer, make a bootable USB, make a Time Machine backup of Big Sur drive, then erase and reformat your drive Journalled HFS+ with GUID partitioning, and re-install El Capitan on it. After installing, run Migration Assistant or choose restore data from Time Machine.

You may have a problem: Big Sur apps may not be compatible with El Capitan (I'm pretty sure Safari version 14.0.3 won't work with El Capitan.

 

[cra19j]

Read this discussion. I think you need to have HFS+, not APFS for El Capitan. I'd download a new copy of El Capitan installer, make a bootable USB, make a Time Machine backup of Big Sur drive, then erase and reformat your drive Journalled HFS+ with GUID partitioning, and re-install El Capitan on it. After installing, run Migration Assistant or choose restore data from Time Machine.

You may have a problem: Big Sur apps may not be compatible with El Capitan (I'm pretty sure Safari version 14.0.3 won't work with El Capitan.

I found a new Catalina installation has a major problem with a time machine backup done using Big Sur. I didn't like Big Sur, and thought I'd be right to use time machine to restore documents and files, but I tried and it didn't work. Catalina will see the disk, and tell you it has data on it, but for me it didn't show a thing. Not a single file using finder on that drive. Disk utility says it has so much of the drive used, and so much free, but that's it. I was lucky to have other backups of all the files I needed. I understand that Big Sur uses a different system for Time Machine than earlier versions of MacOS, and time machine is not backwards compatible from Big Sur to any earlier OS X.

 

[gilby101]

I found a new Catalina installation has a major problem with a time machine backup done using Big Sur. I didn't like Big Sur, and thought I'd be right to use time machine to restore documents and files, but I tried and it didn't work.

Did you use the Time Machine app or just Finder? My experience was that Catalina Finder will show the latest BS backup and that files can be restored from that.

 

[cra19j]

Did you use the Time Machine app or just Finder? My experience was that Catalina Finder will show the latest BS backup and that files can be restored from that.

Finder showed the Time Machine drive but showed no files or folders present. It looked like an empty SSD. The only way to see that it had data was to look on Disk Utility, which showed the amount of space used by Time Machine backups.