The install of El Capitan, at least what I thought was the installation, took a while. A screen shows up with the 10.11 logo stating to install click continue, agree to terms and install OS, I got the option to use disk utility, time machine or recovery or click the install button. I clicked, installation (from bootable flash drive) it stated to restart, with this done a message came that there was installation media on the destination volume, try again.
I restarted and got a progress bar (Apple logo above) which never fully finished, or it did but nothing happened. After walking away for an hour or two, I powered the machine down, restarted it with the option button to get the start up disk manager but only got the apple logo and progress bar, again. I tried to start in recovery mode, also in safe mode with the progress bar appearing after each attempt.
Obviously, I cannot access the drive to remove whatever install media is present on that disk. What options do I have at this point?
Thank you
I
Install Mac Os El Capitan
Can't Reinstall Os X El Capitan
Click continue and it will download the El Capitan installer. When the installer is downloaded it will automatically launch. As it launches Quit the installer at the first question. That will leave. In theory, you should have to install El Capitan only once, or never if your Mac came with El Capitan preinstalled. And in a perfect world, that would be the case. But you might find occasion to install, reinstall, or use it to upgrade, such as If your Mac is currently running any version of OS X except El Capitan. As explained here, OS X 10.11 'El Capitan' fails to install because it is too old (the technical reason being that the signing certificate is no longer valid). But you can trick the OS X installer into thinking that it is 2017 and it will happily run without any errors.