Recovering an iMac to OS X El Capitan
A friend of mine recently relocated to another country and left his 27" iMac (2019 or so) behind hoping that we could ship it to him at a later date. As it happens, shipping is more trouble than it's worth so he asked me to find a good home for it. I am planning on using it as a Music Server.
Remotely, he wiped the disk clean and sent me a code to unlock the disk. I started the iMac, connected it to my home WiFi network and immediately, the iMac went into some sort of "wipe" mode as expected. When I was asked for the 4 digit unlock code, I entered it and was presented with OS X Utilities page with gave me four options:
- Restore from Time Machine Backup
- Reinstall OS X
- Get Help Online
- Disk Utility
I chose #2 and attempted to reinstall the OS and was taken to an Install screen for OS X El Capitan 10.11. I elected "Continue", agreed to the software T's & C's, selected the disk to install to, entered my Apple ID and password, was asked to authnticate and was informed the download process would take 37 minutes. The install process proceeds counting down until there are about 8 seconds left and then the "Time Remaining" jumps to about 22 minutes. When the the time remaining then gets to less than 10 second remaining the "Time Remaining" jumps back to 20 minutes. And so on and so forth for about an hour each time until I arrive back at the OS X Utilities page and am presented with the 4 choices once again. I think it's safe to say that OS X has not loaded.
However, looking at my iPhone, I can now see that the iMac 27" is now on my list of devices. So I can at least see that the iMac is successfully communicating with the App Store.
So now what? Are there components missing from the download that prevents the completion of the install? Or am I now the proud owner of a beautiful brick?
Any suggestions or thoughts would be much appreciated.
Thanks,
John
iMac (2017 – 2020)
