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sms1295

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 26, 2014
4
0
I have an iMac that came with Mavericks which I thought I had registered under my Apple ID, but I don’t see it as a device. I’m looking to do a clean install, so I went to disk utilities and did the following:

Erased the HD in Mac OS Extended (journaled)
Booted back in Disk Utilities
Selected Reinstall OSX
Went through the screens including entering my Apple ID/pw
I then get the message “This item is temporarily unavailable”

I’ve seen sever post about people not getting by this message which I’ve tried. I’ve also tried the following:

Downloaded a copy of Yosemite from Cnet and tried created an install USB using TransMac. I was able to restore the image from the USB on the iMac. When I restarted, it appears something was loading and about half way through it stopped. I tried a few times and finally gave up.

I found a Mavericks Installer (~5 GB) file which I copied to my Windows PC and used TransMac to transfer to a USB drive. I’ve not gotten this to work either.

I would like to get a OS X installed on the iMac. Can someone provide me the instructions to do so?

Thanks,
 
There's no need to install from cnet at all. Get your Apple software and hardware from Apple, not from a third party site.
 
It seems you don't have a backup? Next time you might want to first use Time Machine/ Disk Utility to create backup to external drive so you won't find yourself in similar situation again...

What you can do is:

1. If the Mac is relatively recent model 2009> you could try Internet recovery by holding Option-Command-R down while the Mac is booting.
2. If your Mac is older model you could use original install DVD which came with your Mac.
3. Ask a friend to create OS X install media for you, instructions for Sierra but same principle works for older versions too.
 
I gave the Internet Recovery option a try. All that happened was that Lion was available. I have decided to give up and purchases a recover disk for about $20.00. Hopefully this will get me back going. Thanks for replying.
 
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