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User profile for user: RainofEnigma
RainofEnigma Author
User level: Level 1
9 points

Help with 2011 imac reinstall? Screwed up disk utility

Long story short I'm trying to do a factory reset on my 2011 imac. It was running High Sierra. I followed Apple's instructions, and it said to erase the HD using APFS format (it had defaulted to MS Journaled when I clicked drop down)---but now it won't reinstall the OS. It gets all the way to the end and says "Could not create pre-boot volume for APFS install". So then I saw a suggestion online to delete the drive and re-add with MS Journal formatting, so I tried that, but when I hit add, the only formats available are APFS.


So now in disk utility, I only have


INTERNAL--Container disk 2 (APFS Container) Not mounted. 196Mb with 499 GB free.

DISK IMAGES: OSX Base System Disk Image Volume- Mac OS Extended. 1.29GB used, 720MB free.


I have no idea what either of them are. But the first one is the one I deleted, but then it auto-filled with what's there now when I restarted with CMD CTRL R.



So how do I fix this at this point? Or did I brick it? I don't really care which OS I get back at this point, but I'd love to get it working again since it was fine before the reset (only did it to sell it).


Any help is very very appreciated.

iMac 21.5″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Jul 12, 2021 3:04 PM

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User profile for user: HWTech
HWTech
User level: Level 9
60,752 points

Posted on Jul 12, 2021 3:33 PM

Within Disk Utility you need to click "View" and select "Show All Devices" so that the physical drive appears on the left pane of Disk Utility. Then erase the whole physical drive as GUID partition and MacOS Extended (Journaled). This is the better file system, but if you are using an SSD the installer will convert the file system to APFS.


The "Disk Image" is the virtual volume containing the macOS installer boot files.


Try running the Apple Diagnostics to see if any hardware issues are detected. Unfortunately the diagnostics don't detect most types of drive failures so if you can boot into macOS (internal or external drive), then you can use DriveDx to check the health of the drive. If you cannot boot to macOS, then I can provide instructions for using a bootable Linux USB drive to check the health of the drive if you are interested.

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User profile for user: HWTech
HWTech
User level: Level 9
60,752 points

Jul 12, 2021 3:33 PM in response to RainofEnigma

Within Disk Utility you need to click "View" and select "Show All Devices" so that the physical drive appears on the left pane of Disk Utility. Then erase the whole physical drive as GUID partition and MacOS Extended (Journaled). This is the better file system, but if you are using an SSD the installer will convert the file system to APFS.


The "Disk Image" is the virtual volume containing the macOS installer boot files.


Try running the Apple Diagnostics to see if any hardware issues are detected. Unfortunately the diagnostics don't detect most types of drive failures so if you can boot into macOS (internal or external drive), then you can use DriveDx to check the health of the drive. If you cannot boot to macOS, then I can provide instructions for using a bootable Linux USB drive to check the health of the drive if you are interested.

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Help with 2011 imac reinstall? Screwed up disk utility

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