how to boot using internet recovery mode

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how to boot using internet recovery mode

Hello Everyone,

I had to completely reformat and wipe clean my internal hard drive on my 2007 iMac. I have an external hard drive with a duplicate of my internal disk image, and I can boot on it. However I understand that I can't duplicate that image back on my internal hard drive because the duplicate source disk is the the boot disk, and I erased my recovery partition in the process, so I have no other OSX system to boot from. How do I restore my recovery partition and/or clone my external HD boot disk back to my internal? Do I need to get a live Linux usb and duplicate the drives in Gnome or Ubuntu? Can Linux format a drive in the OS X Extended format?

Someone also mentioned the possiblity of "internet recovery mode". Is that possible with an iMac this ancient? It's running El Capitan. How do you boot from internet recovery mode, and does it need an ethernet connection to do that (I'm assuming since there's no software to boot there's no way to join a wireless network).

Sorry for the rambling, thanks for the help!

iMac, OS X 10.11

Posted on Dec 4, 2019 3:17 PM

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Answer 1

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MrHoffman

Level 10

149,359 points

Dec 4, 2019 3:56 PM in response to dfk210

Fix whatever hardware problem has probably triggered this request for reinstallation. Folks looking to reinstall macOS are usually chasing some corruption, and corruptions and crashes and performance issues and beachballs can and variously are caused by failing hardware. A hard disk from 2007 is quite possibly failing, too.

This iMac is far too old for Internet Recovery, so you'll have to create, boot, and use a bootable installer on some USB flash storage, using either macOS booted from that existing external bootable storage device (your backup, apparently), or using another Mac. Then use that bootable installer to erase and format the internal storage as GPT and HFS+ and load macOS, and either restore your Time Machine backup (and I'd get Time Machine going after the install, if you're not already using that), or use Migration Assistant during the installation to migrate the users to the new environment from that external clone, or however the files and data were preserved.

I'd probably use Migration Assistant here within the installation, and not clone the backup over. This'll get you a clean installation, without the usual old stuff that accretes in the file system of an old Mac.

To create the bootable installer, you'll need a Mac. The tooling and the rest all assumes that, and not Linux, BSD or such.

Some related reading:

About macOS Recovery - Apple Support

How to reinstall macOS from macOS Recovery - Apple Support

How to create a bootable installer for macOS - Apple Support

Restore your Mac from a backup - Apple Support

Use target disk mode to move files to another computer - Apple Support

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how to boot using internet recovery mode

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