How to update from 10.5.8

jorden209 wrote:

i too have this problem.

Mines an early 2008 iMac desktop. If i use the original disks to reinstall Leopard (10.5) which it came with, how then do i install Snow Leopard to be able to carry on up the update ladder? (i foolishly had the SL disk from purchase years ago and binned it not realising i may need it ever again!)

The end result is hopefully a clean install for a new owner, but doing internet recovery asks for my apple ID to install its last OS (Yosemite).

Unfortunately you need to have macOS 10.6 Snow Leopard in order to download and install the later versions of macOS. Apple no longer sells the OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard DVDs so you will need to find a used retail version online. Or if you have access to another Mac that is compatible with macOS 10.11 El Capitan, then you can use these instructions for downloading & creating a bootable macOS 10.11 USB installer:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372

You can try booting into Internet Recovery Mode using Command + Option + R. Apple is a bit vague on which older systems can do this.

Just make sure to perform a clean install of macOS by first erasing the whole physical drive. To make sure your personal data is secured it is best to enable Filevault on the drive. Once the encryption process is complete, then a simple erase will destroy all data on the hard drive. Otherwise you need to write a single pass of zeroes to the hard drive to wipe out your data. In addition to what I've just mentioned here is an Apple article on how to prepare a Mac for sale:

https://support.apple.com/guide/disk-utility/erase-and-reformat-a-storage-device-dskutl14079/mac

Note: http://checkcoverage.apple.com/ is a more secure method to read the serial number.

For the first decade of the millennium, Apple's serial numbers usually could be read based on the following structure.

xxABCyyyyyyyy

where xx is the code for the factory that manufactured it.

A is the last digit of the year (i.e. 2007 = 7).

BC is the week of the year. So CL743 is the 43rd week of 2007.

Knowing which week of the year, and model we can figure out what can run on the computer.

"You can try booting into Internet Recovery Mode using Command + Option + R. Apple is a bit vague on which older systems can do this."

This only works on July 22, 2011 Macs and later that shipped with 10.7 or later.

The exception is for regular recovery, only available if the recovery partition was made and the drive is viable, and the firmware was available to make that recovery partition usable:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202313

Note, this internet recovery function as far as I know only provided 10.7 or later. I have never heard of an instance where 10.6.8 or earlier came over internet recovery.

ColinY wrote:

iMac 9,1

My previous post to @jorden209 applies to the iMac 9,1 series (early & mid 2009) as well.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252231594?answerId=254313386022#254313386022

i too have this problem.

Mines an early 2008 iMac desktop. If i use the original disks to reinstall Leopard (10.5) which it came with, how then do i install Snow Leopard to be able to carry on up the update ladder? (i foolishly had the SL disk from purchase years ago and binned it not realising i may need it ever again!)

The end result is hopefully a clean install for a new owner, but doing internet recovery asks for my apple ID to install its last OS (Yosemite).

What is the exact model of your Mac?

[Link Edited by Moderator]

iMac 9,1

a brody wrote:

Note: http://checkcoverage.apple.com/ is a more secure method to read the serial number.

Unfortunately this doesn't work for Macs that are no longer supported by Apple. Unfortunately the moderators do not understand that the only way to identify older Macs is by using a third party website which the moderators block. Using the serial number does give you a date, but we may also need to know whether we are dealing with a MacBook or a MacBook Pro since the OS options can be greatly different between them.