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