Restoring Early 2008 iMac to sell. Restore CD?

If you are planning to reset it to factory defaults, a cd with OSX 10.5 Leopard shipped with your iMac, which is an external disc, maybe you have upgraded to lion/mountain lion, if so you can use recovery mode to install a fresh copy of OSX. (Hold command+r at startup)

These links might be helpful:

http://www.apple.com/au/osx/recovery/

What to do before selling or giving away your Mac

Good Luck!

According to the licensing agreement, any OS you obtained at the app store is NOT transferable and forever tied to your Apple ID and you must uninstall it before selling a Mac. You have to reinstall the original OS it came with which, in your case, should have been leopard (10.5). You can use those, or call Apple for replacements if you no longer have them.

The new owner must upgrade to Lion or Mountain lion using their own Apple ID or they will never be able to update any app or reinstall the OS.

maybe you have upgraded to lion/mountain lion, if so you can use recovery mode to install a fresh copy of OSX. (Hold command+r at startup)

Unfortunately, that is not what the SLA requires.

Your iMac is probably from april 2008. If you cant find the original CD's shipped with your iMac you can get new ones from Apple support. If you manage to get hold of some install CD's make sure the OSX version is at least 10.5.2 otherwise it won't recognize your iMac with current hardware. And you won't be able to boot from the CD's at all.

First of all don't forget to take backup of your files before preparing the iMac for sale. Also make sure to erase the hard-drive securely if you had personal or sensitive files on it. Check out this article for help!

Mac OS X: How to zero all data on a disk

Cheers!

Early 2008 iMacs came with 10.5.2 preinstalled. You'll need the original disks that came with your iMac so you can erase you drive and reinstall the system.