Problems reinstalling OS on old 2011 iMac

I’m hoping from some help as I evidently have no idea what I’m doing and maybe the hive mind can help. I have an old mid 2011 iMac which I hadn’t used properly for years. It has a disk drive but although I have a disk for ‘iPod & iTunes’ there isn’t anything with the OS on it. I went through and signed out of iCloud etc, then did Command+R and erased everything. But now I can’t reinstall anything. If I just turn it on I get a white screen with a flashing grey folder icon with a ? In the middle. If I Command+R (or Cmd+ Option+R) it seems to go into internet recovery mode, goes through what looks like a downloading process, and then a white screen with an apple icon comes up and that’s where it stops.


Does anyone have ANY ideas?


TIA

iMac 27″, OS X 10.10

Posted on Jul 8, 2023 9:45 AM

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Posted on Jul 8, 2023 2:29 PM

Two ways to address this.


  1. Use Recovery to reinstall the OS of your iMac. Apple guideline here Use macOS Recovery on an Intel-based Mac - Apple Support (CA). You can also try to restart the iMac by pressing Option-Shift-Command-R. This will factory reset you machine to the original OS shipped with your iMac and you can update from there. Let the download process finish and follow the steps.
  2. Fresh install 10.13 via bootable USB installer. Apple guidelines here How to download and install macOS - Apple Support and here Create a bootable installer for macOS - Apple Support. This link also have a step by step guide of installing the OS that I won’t repeat here. You need to make an installer using another Mac, Linux or Windows.


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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jul 8, 2023 2:29 PM in response to Jestive

Two ways to address this.


  1. Use Recovery to reinstall the OS of your iMac. Apple guideline here Use macOS Recovery on an Intel-based Mac - Apple Support (CA). You can also try to restart the iMac by pressing Option-Shift-Command-R. This will factory reset you machine to the original OS shipped with your iMac and you can update from there. Let the download process finish and follow the steps.
  2. Fresh install 10.13 via bootable USB installer. Apple guidelines here How to download and install macOS - Apple Support and here Create a bootable installer for macOS - Apple Support. This link also have a step by step guide of installing the OS that I won’t repeat here. You need to make an installer using another Mac, Linux or Windows.


Jul 8, 2023 10:36 AM in response to Jestive

Yup, sure do, Jestive… that question mark in the folder means your iMac can’t find a valid system folder to boot from, and it doesn’t support Internet Recovery… I see you tried to boot from the Recovery partition ( holding down command/Apple+ R together on startup) , not so good… anyways, what you should try to do before that is reset the SMC/PMU and zap pram 3-4 times on startup, before trying the built in Recovery Partition… here’s how to do that : https://www.macworld.com/article/224955/how-to-reset-a-macs-nvram-pram-and-smc.html#:~:text=Intel%20Macs&text=Press%20the%20power%20button%2C%20and,Mac%20to%20continue%20starting%20normally…. Then try the Recovery Partition ( command+R held down on startup as per usual) and see what that gets you… assuming your Recovery partition is good , you can also restart holding down the “Option” key which will get you the Startup Manager and the Recovery Partion should be listed there, use left and right and click to select the drive/ thing to start up from.. when in Recovery, after you’ve picked a language+ continued, moving your cursor to

the top centre of your screen will get you Mac OS X Tools ( Disk Utility, Terminal and a few other things) , then maybe run Disk Utility to verify your hard drive /storage is good and then Re-install the MacOS… make sure to set the startup drive as the Internal one when you’re done… hopefully it all goes well for you… if not, you’d have to make a bootable USB stick

with the MacOS installer on it, properly prepared, and boot from that, using the startup Manager command, and then plugging in

the usb stick, choosing it, and booting from

it. I’ve used LionDiskmaker X successfully in

the past to do that..but there may be other utilities that can do that on the Mac…


hope this helps you

John B

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Problems reinstalling OS on old 2011 iMac

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