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Bought an iMac at a garage sale, problems with OS...

A

Amadore

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 13, 2009
3
0
So I recently purchased an iMac at a garage sale. Got it for a great deal (2006 model, 50 bucks), and booted it up when I came home.

Everything looked fine, but it boots to the "Mac OS X Utilities" screen. I see 4 options:

Restore from time machine backup
Reinstall Mac OS X
Get help online
Disk utility

When I try to reinstall Mac OS X Lion, I am prompted to login to my App Store account. After I login, I am told "This Apple ID has not purchased lion". I hit ok and then...nothing.

Is there any way around this? I'd be happy to buy a copy of lion, but I can't get to the app store. Is there anything I can do at this point? Apple store is 3 hours away...

Thanks,
 
Drew017

Drew017

macrumors 65816
May 29, 2011
1,254
11
East coast, USA
Amadore said:
So I recently purchased an iMac at a garage sale. Got it for a great deal (2006 model, 50 bucks), and booted it up when I came home.

Everything looked fine, but it boots to the "Mac OS X Utilities" screen. I see 4 options:

Restore from time machine backup
Reinstall Mac OS X
Get help online
Disk utility

When I try to reinstall Mac OS X Lion, I am prompted to login to my App Store account. After I login, I am told "This Apple ID has not purchased lion". I hit ok and then...nothing.

Is there any way around this? I'd be happy to buy a copy of lion, but I can't get to the app store. Is there anything I can do at this point? Apple store is 3 hours away...

Thanks,
Click to expand...

Why not go back to the person you bought your iMac from and get them to enter their password? Then you can download Lion and all will be well :D

... Or you could get a copy of Snow Leopard online (ie eBay) and clean install. This will probably be a better overall os for this machine.
 
noteple

noteple

macrumors 68000
Aug 30, 2011
1,505
523
The 2006 is old but sounds like it has at least snow leopard if you can get to the App store.

You can only download Lion if you bought Lion against your Apple ID.
 
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