I have never had any trouble with this machine and I am not familiar with diagnosing.

I guess my question is can I reinstall the original OS from the disk or the Time Machine and eventually upgrade back to El Capitan? Do I need to reformat the HD to do so? I am at a loss as to how to proceed. I don't care about the data since the last backup. I do have a backup Time Machine of about a year ago. My hard drive had been renamed to diskOs2 and greyed out. I used the original disks to access disk utility. I get the attached screenshot flashed up briefly. If I try CMD R the logo appears and the progress bar does not progress beyond about 10%. Upon restarting I was unable to boot up normally. I believe the error message said no packages were eligible for install.

After a few hours of download I tried installing. I was able to use CMD R to reinstall OSX. Just ran across this thread after I tried reinstall of El Capitan on my mid 2007 iMac. I have been fighting with this on/off for a couple of months now and I am completely baffled with why this will not work. I have provided a screen shot of the message that comes up everytime I try and fail. I tried all of these attempts more than once with the same result. I even tried to install 10.11 using my 2009 MacPro Tower on an extra drive I have here.

I WAS able to clone my own 10.11 volume from my MacPro to this MBP but of course that was not the final result I was intending because I need a clean/new system not a copy of my own.It looked this was working because it took a while for it to download and install. Tried form the recovery partition, re-downloading the OS directly.tried from an external drive that had the 10.11 installer.Installed starting from 10.6 and kept installing each subsequent system until I reached 10.10 but when I tried 10.11 no luck.I have tried a few different ways as listed below: I need to repurpose this older MBP for someone else here. I cannot clean install MAC OSX 10.11 on my 2009 Mac Book Pro.

Install os x el capitan to new drive