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I want to go from yosemite one step up to el capitan. I dowloaded the OS, it installed but my computer still says it's running on yosemite (?) I rebooted and reinstalled twice. No luck. Any idea what's wrong?
MacBook Air 11″, OS X 10.10
I take it that you downloaded InstallMacOSX.dmg from this
Apple page,
How to upgrade to OS X El Capitan – Apple Support
When you open the InstallMacOSX.dmg you would have seen InstallMacOSX.pkg.
Double-clicking InstallMacOSX.pkg will open an installation window.
Following the prompts you will read that this will take 7MBs of disk space.
Now please note that no installation of an OS takes up only 7MBs of disk space,
and no installation of an operating system takes 2 seconds.
What is happening is the installation process is creating the Install OS X El Capitan.app (6.2GBs)
which you will find in your Applications folder.
If you have done this have a look in your Applications folder.
Double-clicking on the Install OS X El Capitan.app will start the real installation process.
This will probably take about thirty minutes and uses about 30GBs of disk space.
The Install OS X El Capitan.app self deletes after installation.
It is a wise idea to make a copy of it before commencing the installation.
You can simply copy it over to an external drive.
Or you can create a bootable USB stick installer using the instructions here,
How to create a bootable installer for macOS – Apple Support
or by using this free app, https://macdaddy.io/install-disk-creator/
I take it that you downloaded InstallMacOSX.dmg from this
Apple page,
How to upgrade to OS X El Capitan – Apple Support
When you open the InstallMacOSX.dmg you would have seen InstallMacOSX.pkg.
Double-clicking InstallMacOSX.pkg will open an installation window.
Following the prompts you will read that this will take 7MBs of disk space.
Now please note that no installation of an OS takes up only 7MBs of disk space,
and no installation of an operating system takes 2 seconds.
What is happening is the installation process is creating the Install OS X El Capitan.app (6.2GBs)
which you will find in your Applications folder.
If you have done this have a look in your Applications folder.
Double-clicking on the Install OS X El Capitan.app will start the real installation process.
This will probably take about thirty minutes and uses about 30GBs of disk space.
The Install OS X El Capitan.app self deletes after installation.
It is a wise idea to make a copy of it before commencing the installation.
You can simply copy it over to an external drive.
Or you can create a bootable USB stick installer using the instructions here,
How to create a bootable installer for macOS – Apple Support
or by using this free app, https://macdaddy.io/install-disk-creator/
I want to add (but this forum won't let me edit my message) - the reason I'm doing this is I want to move data from an ipads to my computer through itunes and I got this message to upgrade. Otherwise I would not upgrade.
Eau,
I can't tell you how much I appreciate your help. I spent all day trying to figure this out - someone even suggested trying to back the mac clock everal years through the terminal in order to get my computer to accept the install because mac won't allow it to be installed after a certain date.
Thanks so much for telling me that the install was in my app folder. Oddly enough I had looked for it there in one of my various attempts, but what threw me off was the app name wasn't obvious - I was looking alphabetically for "El Capitan" but the app started with the word "install" and my window divider overlapped the second part of the word. I guess I have too many apps.
I spent most of the day searching "upgrade Yosemite to El Capitan" on google and kept getting maps of the Sierras.
-K
El Capitan Installs but nothing changes
