I reset my macbook air and when I got to “Reinstall OS X” it says the “Item is Temporarily unavailable. Try Again Later.”

[TONI651]

So I got a macbook air from a friend and wanted to wipe everything from the computer. I followed the steps from a youtube video (which might have been my error) but after I erased everything from the Macintosh HD drive I went to “Reinstall OS X”, as it was running on OS X El Capitan, and when I get to the part that says to login to app store to download, I keep getting the same pop-up window saying, “Item is temporarily unavailable. Try again later.” Anyone know anything that could help me??

 

[Shirasaki]

AFAIK if your MacBook supports Catalina you can no longer “officially” install anything that is older than that. You can try to boot to internet recovery and see how it goes.

There are sites that you can poke around and get a El Capitan image to install to. It’s up to you.

 

[chscag]

Which MacBook Air do you have? Model and year? Also like the previous reply stated, you can try internet recovery as that will install the version of macOS that originally came with the machine.

How to use Internet Recovery to reinstall macOS

1. Shut down your Mac.
2. Hold down Command-Option/Alt-R and press the Power button. ...
3. Hold down those keys until you a spinning globe and the message "Starting Internet Recovery. ...
4. The message will be replaced with a progress bar. ...
5. Wait for the MacOS Utilities screen to appear.