Wiped drive, now can’t reinstall El Capitan from Recovery because the "item is temporarily unavailable"
I wanted to clear room on my computer, so I restarted the computer with cmd+r keys and opened OS X Utilities. I erased my drive and wanted to reinstall OS X El Capitan. After I agreed to the terms then selected my drive I signed into the Apple store. I put the confirmation code in from my phone and it said “This item is temporarily unavailable Try again later”. I tried restarting it and trying then shutting it down and trying but it still won’t work.
I ran into this issue myself. NoahL's comment is spot on: try Internet Recovery (Command+Option+R).
I was trying to reinstall macOS on a laptop. The on-disk recovery kept giving me this error message after I gave it my AppleID in the reinstall wizard:
This item is temporarily unavailable.
Try again later.
I retried two weeks later, and still got the same error. I found this thread and tried out Internet Recovery and I was able to reinstall macOS.
Note: I had to erase the disk with Disk Utility before Internet Recovery would let me reinstall macOS, because the version on disk was newer than the version that will be installed.
(I don't know why Internet Recovery doesn't just offer the latest macOS...)
Process:
- I created a USB disk with a bootable El Capitan as per this documentation.
- Plug-in your USB key on a turned-off computer.
- Start your Mac, press immediately OPTION (aka ALT)
- Select the Orange icon (aka a USB stick) labelled El Capitan. If it does not detect it after 10 sec and you only see your hard-drive. Try another USB port and wait 10 sec again. Often it appears then.
- Once booted, select your language
- NOW, CRUCIAL, FIRST THING. Select the "Get HELP Online" item which will open Safari. Then type https://icloud.com, log in with your itunes credentials. Once logged in, close Safari. (You might need to go the top menu to exit Safari).
- Back to the main menu window. Click on the "install OS X" item, follow instructions and it should NOT ask you for itunes anymore and therefore not timeout with "This item is temporarily unavailable. Please try again".
Key points:
- You have to go to Safari FIRST. Don't try to install and see the "temporary unavailable" bug and then try the Help/Safari trick. It will not work. Reboot and redo the process with Safari first then the Install.
- I am unsure, but you might need to wipe the whole disk to not have any partitions available (that means Recovery HD and Macinstosh HD, using the default names)
PS: The above work for me on a Macbook Pro 2009 and Maverick but I could not reinstall Maverick due to an itunes login to old and incompatible with the security code that Apple uses now... Hence straight to El Capitan which supports the security code (via the https://icloud.com login;). That said, in hindsight, the same trick could have worked with Maverick too using the recovery partition...