Imac, Dead, cant reinstall iOS
 

The hard drive on my i7 imac died a very sudden death last week.

As its way out of any warranty, i opened it up ad replaed the 320gb WD HDD with a 1TB WD i had lying around.

Then came the problems,

As i bought the machine SH, there were no discs in any way shape or form ...

However i had a time machine backup on the external HDD, so i thought i could recover from there...

Turns out i cant. the mac can see the drive, occasionally, but wont let me boot or recover from it.

I cant do i net recovery, that dosent work ..

I could however install windows from scratch with no problem. :wonder:

So from then on in its been trying to read up in windows, shut down and boot or attempt to boot into iOS

So far ive burnt a recovery USB... no good, the mac dosent see the USB ports with a boot / recovery DMG on it

Reset PVRS and whatever other combination of key presses at boot to see if i can get the dam thing to see anything.

It sees the external USB HDD but wont play ball

It wont see the USB recovery stick??

It sees the DVD drive, but you need to have a dual layer disk to burn a boot/ recovery disk

so £30 later for a pack of ten dual layer disks, ive burnt my first one, and it

still wont reinstall iOS, just goes through a boot loop, and loads windows lol

Any ideas, before i format the ext HDD and turn it into another windows drive

Mart :D

I am a novice when it comes to Mac stuff, but I did balls up the configuration on my Mac Mini a while back. There was a series of keystrokes which used a pxe boot type thing, which went out to apple's servers, downloaded the installer and installed the os.

I think it was holding Command-Option-R at startup that invoked the recovery. You may need to ensure your imac can lease an address from your router.

Tried that no joy :(


Mart

Double check the format of the USB stick.

According to the data from transmac

GPT Partition Map

1) 200mb EFI system Partition
2) 5.9Gb Apple HFS (HFS+)


And the install folder reads

Mac OS Extended (HFS+)


Mart

Here's how it should go. Boot to your key by holding option on startup - could be labeled Alt - once that's running chose utilities Disk Utility, format your new HD. Install OSX, install Windows using Bootcamp.

No Joy, holding down Alt/Opt, just shows the windows drive .

If i plug in the external HDD/ time machine it shows up, clicking on that just give me the apple logo and nothing else, until it times out and boots of the windows disc.

If i remove the Timemachine and plug the usb stick in, it dosent see it,
either as a vanilla boot, or a hot swap.

All the usb ports work as i have stuf running off all of them once booted to windows...

Mart

Sounds like your key is not formatted correctly. You should 100% be able to boot from it.

Does seem odd... i have another option i'll try later


Mart

Not sure if things have changed but it used to be a pain creating one from a Windows machine or at least easy to get wrong. Ideally you would have used a drive dock to prep the new disk before changing over, but it doesn't sound like that was an option.

No drive just stopped dead, you hear the stepper motor just hunting non stop. :(

Anyway tried the usb key in a colleages mac today ..

it saw it straight away. Corectly formatted & partitioned ...

I got him to wipe the key, and reformat.

Stuck it in the Mac when i got in... Nothing ..

It just shows a windows drive.

Bloody strange, thats for sure lol


Mart

Did his Mac boot from it, that's the deal breaker.

When he formatted the stick did he set the "ignore ownership" flag?

After your colleague formatted the stick, what steps did you follow? Just formatting a usb stick and sticking it into your knackered machine is unlikely to show the stick as bootable. Can he not run createinstallmedia from his machine against the stick to make a bootable USB installation stick for you?

This may be an alternative option if you have access to another mac http://diskmakerx.com/

Your post reads that you've installed Windows on the MAC? I'm sure you can't dual boot with Windows being installed first due to the boot partition etc. OSX needs to be installed first then dual boot using Bootcamp to install Windows.

I maybe wrong but I thought that was the way it has to go.

You must be doing something wrong as it is Apple "It Just Works" :D

this is also my understanding. You should be able to see the USB device, however, when holding Alt when booting.... can't think what's wrong there.

I'd try another port, then another stick and these instructions https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201372

Will have a go next week, if i get time,

The colleague who's mac it is is only about till tuesday, then he's off on his hols until Jan ( Lucky blighter lol)

if not i will wait unti lthe new year:D

mart

If you're really stuck I could post one, otherwise Windows 10 isn't all that bad :)