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iMac operating system won't update

F

fizzy88

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 21, 2012
6
0
NYC
Hi,

I have an iMac that is roughly 3.5 yrs old. It is running OS 10.5.8. I have tried twice to upgrade it to 10.6.3 (eventually I would like to have it fully up to date), and it appears to go through the whole install process, but when I check the OS after the install it still says Version 10.5.8.

I called Apple and they said to take it into the genius bar because they had never heard of this problem, but I would like to avoid that since it will cost me.

Please help!!

Thanks.
 
Did you use the retail version of OS X 10.6? In other words, does the DVD you used have a picture of a snow leopard on it, or are they gray? In order to get a successful update, you'd need the former since the latter are tailored for specific Mac models.
 
I have just spent a week with an iMac7,1 that was running Mountain Lion 10.8.1. When I made the upgrade to 10.8.2, it failed to update. It went through the whole update process but on restart just stuck at grey tick screen. After many things, including but not limited to: starting in single user mode CMD + S and running fsck; installing ubuntu and reformatting the entire HDD; installing 10.6.0 from DVD, creation of 10.8.2 install USB's, 10.8.2 install DVD's - most of which seemed to install, but didn't. In the end I've left the iMac at the highest successfully updated OS which in my case in 10.6.8. I can't even go back to 10.7.

I notice by examining the logs that my install process encountered permission errors, I spent a day typing unix commands to try and normalise the HDD/USB/DVD permissions/prebindings = shared dyld caches and exotic ephemora. (stuff like sudo -s
ln -s /usr/bin/update_dyld_shared_cache /usr/bin/update_prebinding)

I think at this stage that I'll stick with 10.6.8. In future I might need to remove the HDD and prepare in an external machine, as sometimes there is no-way to diagnose a very complex fault to get what you want to do with the available tools. In my case I could conceivably have had a malware rootkit attack on the old iMac.

Fizzy88 - best suggestion is to restart your iMac holding command + option + P + R (for three restart bongs) cleans the PRAM/NVRAM then restart again into single user mode with command + S , do the /sbin/fsck -fy and /sbin/mount -uw /, (remembering to repeat the command if errors were corrected), then exit to logon to a single user 10.5 then rerun the 10.6 install procedure from the DVD.
 
Snow Leopard

Since it stil shows 10.5.8, that can only mean that it does not go through the whole installation process. Try booting from the snow leopard dvd and do a clean install. Backup your data before you do this on an external hdd if you can.
 
Graveyard said:
Since it stil shows 10.5.8, that can only mean that it does not go through the whole installation process. Try booting from the snow leopard dvd and do a clean install. Backup your data before you do this on an external hdd if you can.
Click to expand...

How do I boot from show leopard dvd?

Thanks
 
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