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I recently received my uncles old iMac as a gift. I had to factory reset it and the way I was taught on YouTube was to fully delete everything and download the OS again. I deleted everything and now it is not letting me install OS El Capitan and use the computer at all without installing it. What do I do?
Mac OS X Server
taelo Said:
"El Capitan: I recently received my uncles old iMac as a gift. I had to factory reset it and the way I was taught on YouTube was to fully delete everything and download the OS again. I deleted everything and now it is not letting me install OS El Capitan and use the computer at all without installing it. What do I do?"
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What to Try:
Run First Aid: Repair your Disk in Disk Utility - Apple Support
Perform the following in Recovery Mode:
About Reinstalling This:
Your Uncle needs to sign out of his iCloud account on it, and disassociate it from his iTunes account. So, once installed, have your Uncle use this site. Go here to find out more on how to freshly install this: What to do before you sell, give away, or trade in your Mac - Apple Support. As the site reads: The best way to restore your Mac to factory settings is to erase your hard drive and reinstall macOS.
taelo Said:
"El Capitan: I recently received my uncles old iMac as a gift. I had to factory reset it and the way I was taught on YouTube was to fully delete everything and download the OS again. I deleted everything and now it is not letting me install OS El Capitan and use the computer at all without installing it. What do I do?"
-------
What to Try:
Run First Aid: Repair your Disk in Disk Utility - Apple Support
Perform the following in Recovery Mode:
About Reinstalling This:
Your Uncle needs to sign out of his iCloud account on it, and disassociate it from his iTunes account. So, once installed, have your Uncle use this site. Go here to find out more on how to freshly install this: What to do before you sell, give away, or trade in your Mac - Apple Support. As the site reads: The best way to restore your Mac to factory settings is to erase your hard drive and reinstall macOS.
If you are trying to reinstall via Apples Recovery Servers read below,
The certificates for several of Apples OS's expired in October 2019, Apple haven’t bothered getting these updated on
their Recovery Servers with valid certificates.
Try this workaround, we are going to set the time and date on your mac to a date previous to the expiry date of the certificates.
Connect your mac to your router via cable, not WiFi
Boot to your Recovery HD, click on Utilities in the menubar select Terminal.
Make sure WiFi is switched off, it can reset the date back to today.
Enter a new date, for example or just copy and paste
sudo date -u 011421002017
press Return
enter your password
press Return
If Terminal returns an error saying sudo : command not found, then try again without sudo.
just enter
date -u 011421002017
press Return
You won't be prompted for a Password if you did not need to use sudo
Once the date has changed you can quit Terminal.
Now try downloading the OS.
Click on Install OS X, press Continue.
If this works then when the OS is installed and booted up you can Open System Preferences> Date & Time
and reset the time back to today.
El Capitan