2010 27" iMac with "damaged" hard drive

[Candlelight]

Trying to reinstall this machine but keep getting the error "Mountain Lion can not be installed on this machine as drive xxxxxx is damaged and can't be repaired."

Yet when I boot into an alternate OS and use both Disk Utility and Disk Warrior on it it says the drive is viable and healthy.

How should I begin trouble shooting this? Can a 2010 model drive be replaced with an off the shelf drive without the fans tearing off to 100% or do they have to use Apple 'brands'?

 

[Fishrrman]

Have you tried re-initializing the drive before you attempt to do the re-install of the OS?

 

[Candlelight]

Yeah I have. I even opened her up and swapped the drive for another one, same result.

 

[Candlelight]

Alright, turns out this machine had Yosemite on it at some point but arrived on my desk with a new drive in it.

Yosemite is currently installing fine so I'm chalking this up to a firmware issue preventing older OS's from installing.

Pity. Yosemite doesn't allow the software I need to run on it. Oh well.