I want to sell my old iMac, so I tried to erase my hard drive. I started it using Internet Recovery. However, instead of selecting the SATA Internal Physical Volume, I selected the Internal Physical Disk and hit "Erase". It seems to have screwed things up. The SATA Volume is now grayed out and shows as having zero KB free. I tried restoring it and First Aid and it didn't work. Any ideas? I will gladly provide more info if needed.
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I erased the wrong drive
- Thread starter clauditorium
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Do you have the original disks that came with your iMac (assuming it came with disks)? That would be the easiest way to reinstall the version of OS X that came with it. If not, you can try Internet Recovery which will install the version of OS X that your machine had from the factory. Since you didn't tell us which iMac you have it's kind of hard to offer specific advice.
Sorry, I can provide more info. It's a 2010 iMac. There are no disks. And it doesn't let me reinstall via Internet Recovery. I just ran First Aid again on the Internal Physical Disk to get you details on what's wrong. Here's the message I get: "First Aid found corruption that needs to be repaired. To repair the startup volume, run First Aid from Recovery." Except, that's what I just tried to do!
It looks like you may have to swap out that disk if you can't repair it with Disk Utility First Aid. There is other software you can try but generally it's probably not going to work any better and is expensive. The ifixit web site has good instructions on how to change that hard drive (www.ifixit.com). Getting into an iMac is a rather difficult task if you've never done it before. Also, your 2010 iMac uses a special hard drive with temperature sensor. You'll need to buy a special cable to compensate for that temperature sensor or the hard drive fan will rev up to full rpm when you swap out the drive. The cable is sold by Mac Sales. (www.macsales.com)
If all that sounds like too much work, just go ahead and sell your iMac as is with the defective hard drive. That means less money on the sale but doing the repair may not be worth your time and energy.
If all that sounds like too much work, just go ahead and sell your iMac as is with the defective hard drive. That means less money on the sale but doing the repair may not be worth your time and energy.
Formatting the drive like you mentioned earlier, the disk rather than just the volume, is not a problem and did not cause this. It sounds like you have a bad drive and it needs to be replaced.
Are you sure you are booting to "Internet recovery" and not just regular recovery? There is a difference.
Internet recovery (which your 2010 iMac does support) is accessed by holding command-option-r at boot. That should bring up a screen where you select your wifi, then you should see a grey screen with a spinning globe while the recovery utility downloads. Once that is done you will see the recovery screen. From there try using Disk Utility to repair and format the drive.
Yes, I've been using Internet recovery. As you say, there might be a problem with the drive. I am investigating this.
Thanks for the idea. I tried it, but the computer usb boot disk I made isn't showing up for me to boot from it.
Just visit the following site: http://diskmakerx.com/
Used that tool many times. Always works great.
Thank you. I'm sure it works great normally. But I just tried it, and my computer doesn't recognize the USB startup disk as an option. My physical hard drive might need to be replaced.
I'm assuming that your not putting USB stick into a USB hub but directly into one of the ports on the Mac itself. Also, I would try another USB stick, or another port. It shouldn't matter if there's a problem with physical drive, it should still come up as a bootable drive when you start up holding down the option key. Have you also tried booting while holding down "C"? That should try to boot from the USB stick.
Yes, I'm putting the USB directly into the Mac. I don't have any other USB sticks that have a large enough capacity to be used as startup disks. I just tried holding down "C", and it did not work.
I have an update, which might shed some light on the issues. Apparently my graphics card is broken. I am only able to start my computer in safe mode or in internet restore mode...
I have an update, which might shed some light on the issues. Apparently my graphics card is broken. I am only able to start my computer in safe mode or in internet restore mode...
If you're putting the USB drive in directly that was made correctly, there's more that's screwed up besides a HDD.