late 2009 iMac HD wont erase, caused by human error

[nerdymama]

Hello everyone. Sorry to waste you guys time but I hate to sound slow, or retarded but I'm just ill informed about Apple products. My husband made us all switch and it has really been great up until I tried to reset my iMac and do it the wrong way. I have to be thorough in my description of my problem so that anyone willing to assist understands exactly how to assist me in solving this issue without me having to take it to Apple or an authorized Apple company that fixes devices. I do not have the money to pay someone to do what I can probably do on my own with some help. First I went into disk utility and I was afraid to erase the HD to reinstall Mac OS High Sierra because I thought erase meant actually erase and there is no coming back from erase so I clicked restore like the cautious person that I am. I thought everything was going fine. Now it loads a white screen and it has an x on it. I tried to put a dmg file on a disk drive and that didn't work or maybe I don't know what I am doing correctly. I know this is a forum, but is there anyone here who ever has made this kind of error and fixed it themselves? If so can you absolutely walk me through the process. I am HP computer literate and not familiar with Apple which is why I made the mistake that I did. Please don't respond about how dumb I am or why I did what I did. As I stated I was unsure of the consequences of the erase button and kicked myself in the butt afterwards, because I should have trusted my husband who thinks he knows everything. Thanks in advance anyone who has time to help. Also, I already spoke to Apple Support and they are of no use to me. Everything we try shows errors. I need a solution.

 

[Arcade]

Hello,

Here’s a links with some things you can try to fix it.

https://macpaw.com/how-to/fix-white-screen-on-mac.

 

[nerdymama]

Thanks so much.

 

[DeltaMac]

You were correct - erase does mean erase.
Not sure what you did with "Restore", as that has you select the image that you want to use for the restore, and I can't think how the restore would proceed if you don't set that up with the source and destination.

But, moving ahead, you should still have your recovery system...
Boot to that by restarting while holding Command-r
You should boot to a menu screen.
Choose Reinstall macOS. That will download your current system files, then take you through some steps to get your system set up again.
If nothing happens (or you see a flashing folder, or some other than actually booting to anything), then you may have succeeded in wiping the drive completely. You will need a macOS installer to get your iMac working again. You can download the current High Sierra installer app using another Mac. Just open the App Store, and choose it from the Featured window. It's a large download, so download will take some time. Create a bootable installer on a flash drive - it's a good item to keep around, in the event that you need to reinstall again. Apple has the steps on how to make your own.

 

[nerdymama]

I will definitely try these steps and pray they work. Thank you. I am immensely grateful for your response. Erasing anything seemed so final and I didn't believe that was what I was supposed to do to reset it. Thank you.