Not able to re-install old iMac

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Level 1

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Not able to re-install old iMac

Hi Experts

I have an old iMac from 2006 that all of a sudden will not boot anymore. It starts up showing the Apple logo but then the waiting indicator appears and nothing happens. I guess it is a hard drive failure (?)

It is not possible to start in Safe Mode either by holding down the Shift key. If I try booting into to Verbose Mode I can see several I/O disk errors. So I have tried booking into Single-User Mode running the /sbin/fsch -fy command. I get the result that the disk appears to be fine. If I reboot and hold down the Option key I can see that the Mac HD disk appears in the Startup Manager.

I have then tried creating a "rescue disc" with Knoppix. Booting into Knoppix the disk appears fine in the File Manager. I am also able to browse and copy the files to an external disk. So it does not seem completely dead.

Unfortunately I cannot find the original installation discs but I have the discs with Snow Leopard that came with my Mac Book Pro from 2009. Booting from the installation disk seems to start up fine but as soon as the installer is launched I get an error saying that Mac OS cannot be installed on this computer. I don't know if it could be that the installation discs were tailored to the MBP or because the MBP is 64-bit and the iMac only 32-bit.

However I managed to use the installation discs for installing Snow Leopard on an external hard drive. I can then connect it to the iMac and boot from USB. This works fine but opening the Disk Utility I cannot see the internal Mac HD (which appeared with the Knoppix boot).

Any ideas on how to get Snow Leopard recognizing the internal drive and repair it?

Posted on Apr 29, 2016 10:52 AM

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Answer 1

Limnos

Level 10

411,223 points

Apr 29, 2016 11:05 AM in response to jaccchr

Installer discs that come with a machine are often specific to that model line. Sometimes you can do as you have done and boot off an installed version anyway. It's probably violating some license.

I have never heard of this Knoppix before. My feeling is if this drive is being so fussy about being recognized and booting it probably needs replacing anyway. I recently had a fussy drive kind of like that and after wasting 2 hours trying to analyze it I discovered it had a whole bunch of secotrs going bad so I just replaced it and haven't thought about it a minute since then.

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