Help restoring an old iMac

Scottland

Scottland

Scottland

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
15,713
Location
North Wales
Hi,

My other half has an old iMac from work they want to erase/restore so they can flog it. It's an old iMac from around 2007 with a Core2Duo and running Tiger (10.4).

I can't boot into recovery as there doesn't seem to be a recovery partition there, and cmd+R doesn't do anything. They don't have a disc, and the icing on the cake is that they don't know the admin password either!

Any ideas? I think we're pre internet recovery, as cmd+option+R does nothing.


Cheers
 
Is it a white iMac?
I think Snow Leopard is the latest version and you need to make an installer DVD of that.
You can boot from this DVD and change the password - or just format and reinstall it. It is an 8Gb ISO on torrent.
 
It's pre-internet recovery and there's no recovery partition. They started with machines that shipped with OS X 10.7 Lion in 2011, some older 2010 machines could be firmware updated to support internet recovery also.

For this iMac you need the grey restore disks it shipped with for Tiger which are iMac specific, probably 10.4.7 for a C2D. Otherwise a retail Leopard or Snow Leopard disk will clean install. If it shipped with Tiger then it won't go higher than Snow Leopard.

I've got a set somewhere for an original CD MacBook Pro, but they're no use to you really.
 
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