iForgot freezes - what now?

[rbrian]

A friend of mine inherited his father's iMac 12,1. He gave it to me to set up for him, and gave me his passwords. I logged into OSX (10.7.5!) ok, but now I can't do much else. Trying to enter his iCloud password into Settings, or the AppStore, or Mail, it just freezes. Once it said the wrong password had been entered too many times, so I went to iForgot.com. I entered the iCloud email address, and the captur... and after 20 minutes, it's still got a little blue circle spinning. Where do I go from here?

 

[Gav2k]

Use internet recovery to reinstall the os

 

[rbrian]

I tried restarting holding the option key. I clicked recovery disk. It said click here to reinstall Lion. I did. It said it was checking eligibility - after less than 10 seconds, it timed out. I know Apple's reputation has taken a knock recently, but didn't it still "just work" back then?

I have already recovered the music and photos that he wanted, and there's nothing else important on it, so it's probably best to reinstall it from scratch. I don't have a Mac of my own, but I could borrow an ancient plastic MacBook Pro, or possibly one of the new USB-C only ones from another friend. What would be the best way? On Windows, I'd make a USB install drive.