Hello Mac-a-teers!
I arrive at your doors having exhausted all other options that I can search for or know of so throw myself at your mercy for help, advice and assistance.
Let me paint you a picture.
My friend, let's call him Rob, had a Mac Mini (late 2009) running Yosemite 10.10.8 that he no longer required and asked if I would like it, so I said yes, I could use that for something.
Rob isn't very computer literate so I went to help him set up his new Mac Mini (not sure of the model but it was bought this week, came with El Cap) I connected the two together and did the whole migration assistant thing and his new one had all his progs and docs on and Rob was happy
Before I took his Mini away we did the whole "how to prepare your Mac for sale/new user" so following the guide from here - What to do before selling or giving away your Mac - Apple Support
I made a Time Machine Back-up for him and signed out of everything and erased the Mackintosh HD and then there was a power cut (a while after the back-up had been finished.
The Mac then booted into recovery mode fine and we went to the reinstall OS X step and then things started getting weird in that there was an error that kept popping up saying (from memory now) "This item is unavailable" from the App store (or some such) eventually after a while it started working.
Then there was another power cut....
When everything was back on I went back into the recovery mode (he had a PC keyboard so holding the ALT key on boot, I guess this is command?) and the recovery partition with disc utilities came up so it was decided that we'd restore from the Time Machine Back-up and take it from there and whilst this was doing there was.......guess what? Yup another power cut.
Now, this is where it starts to hit the fan because now when booted in recovery mode the Macintosh HD and Recovery 10.10.3 discs come up above the WiFi prompt but despite what I press, bugger all will happen....... I can connect it to the WiFi but after that selecting either disc will bring up the Apple logo and a progress bar that will get to 30-35% and then just stop even if left overnight. It also won't boot into Internet Recovery Mode (afaik I'm pressing the correct PC keyboard keys - Windows Key - ALT and R
This is where I need assistance, I have read a hundred articles/post about how to download and use Recovery Disk Assistant from a USB drive but I own a PC at home, is there a way of writing this to a USB the Mac will understand, I have another Mac at home (a powerPC Mini Mac running Tiger) I tried d/l the Recovery Disk Assistant on this machine but it just plain won't work....
I'm a bit stuck, so throw myself to your expertise to help a poor soul out, or this poor little Mini Mac is getting trashed or turned into a Raspberry Pi enclosure
Thanks in advance,
Eddy.
