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Cannot get iMac mid-2011 to reinstall OSX after erasing drives

Please help and provide your solutions if you can. It would be greatly appreciated.


I have seen and read about this same issue over the internet, but I cannot find a fix to my problem that works for me. I erased the hard drives of my mid-2011 iMac 27" to do a clean install of the OSX and reset it to factory settings. I don't have a bootable DVD for OSX Lion, so I was forced to do the internet recovery process to install a new OS. With this process, I am getting the "do not have components..." error message and so OSX Lion will not install. I have done the online research and tried change the date with Terminal with no luck there. I have another iMac 27", late 2012 which is my primary computer and so I made a bootable external drive with an old LaCie rugged drive I had around. I was able to install OSX Mojave on it. I tested it on the late 2012 iMac, doing the reboot and holding down the option key. Process works fine and I can choose to start up from the OSX on the external LaCie drive. However, this process does NOT work on the mid-2011 iMac that I am trying to get back to working. At this point I am stuck with an iMac paperweight.


Again, any advice or solutions would greatly appreciated. Thank you to anyone who responds.


Cheers,

rung11

iMac 27″, OS X 10.10

Posted on Dec 26, 2020 5:23 PM

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Posted on Dec 26, 2020 5:37 PM

You can not install or run Mojave on a Mid 2011 iMac.


You need to install macOS High Sierra. To do that, go to > https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211683 scroll down to Download macOS and click on macOS High Sierra 10.13.

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5 replies

Dec 26, 2020 9:47 PM in response to den.thed

Thanks for the tip! It took me a while to find a way to get High Sierra installed on a bootable external drive. It wouldn't install on my LaCie external drive but I finally got it installed on a USB stick. I had tried various disk creator programs to create a bootable USB stick with High Sierra but to no avail, however I found a command using Terminal in another forum chat that worked. It was a long day of trial and error, so thank you very much for your tip which OSX to use for the bootable external drive!

Cannot get iMac mid-2011 to reinstall OSX after erasing drives

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