Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

adrian0883

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 14, 2022
13
5
USA
Sorry to bother you all, but I need some assistance. I have a 21.5 inch iMac (A1311 Late 2009) that I need to install High Sierra on. The HDD has been completely reformatted with active killdisk. I need to make a USB using Windows to restore this OS since there is nothing on the HDD of the iMac. Is there a way that I can do this?
 

theMarble

macrumors 65816
Sep 27, 2020
1,019
1,496
Earth, Sol System, Alpha Quadrant
You will not be able to make a working macOS installer from Windows. It needs to be created from a Mac.

It can be any Mac, Intel or Apple Silicon (PPC should work as createinstallmedia is a simple Terminal script but I've never tried it).

With a Mac, you can download High Sierra from Apple's website and follow their instructions on how to create a USB installer using createinstallmedia (a script built into the installer that works through Terminal).
 

17fox

macrumors 6502
Sep 6, 2022
348
549
Vienna, Austria
Sorry to bother you all, but I need some assistance. I have a 21.5 inch iMac (A1311 Late 2009) that I need to install High Sierra on. The HDD has been completely reformatted with active killdisk. I need to make a USB using Windows to restore this OS since there is nothing on the HDD of the iMac. Is there a way that I can do this?
Alternatively, you can try creating a virtual machine running MacOS and making a bootable installer from there. As I can recall, VMWare offers 14-days free trial, so you could use it for it or VirtualBox
 

DCBassman

macrumors 6502a
Oct 28, 2021
755
577
West Devon, UK
@adrian0883 Try and find, using Internet Archive, a High Sierra .iso file. Use a torrent program to download it. Then use Balena Etcher on Windows to flash the installer to a 16GB or larger USB stick. Ignore the warning about no partitioning or whatever. If you really get stuck, I will try and send you the iso, but it will have to wait until I get home from where I'm currently working.
 

MBAir2010

macrumors 604
May 30, 2018
6,975
6,354
there
Sorry to bother you all, but I need some assistance. I have a 21.5 inch iMac (A1311 Late 2009) that I need to install High Sierra on. The HDD has been completely reformatted with active killdisk. I need to make a USB using Windows to restore this OS since there is nothing on the HDD of the iMac. Is there a way that I can do this?
did you try the recovery mode while rebooting?
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.