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Reset early 2008 iMac

skivington

skivington

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 9, 2016
6
2
Scotland
Hi

I am trying to clean up my old iMac to sell and after a few days of trying I am still not able to boot the machine onto recovery mode to scrub the HDD and put on a clean install.

Am running Mavericks with 4G of Ram, using a windows logitech keyboard.

I have tried and retried all the advice on line to get by restarting holding option R, option alone, option command P and R, and any other sequence of key presses I have seen on line to try and get into the recovery screen so I can erase the HDD and reinstall an OS.

Any help greatly appreciated as I am not able to recycle the mac otherwise.

Cheers

Dan
 
On a Windows keyboard, the alt and Windows key function as Option and Command (in that order)

Only one sequence will work for a boot command to boot to your recovery system.
SHOULD be - Windows+r
If that does not work, try booting with Alt+r (but Windows+r should be correct :D )

When you boot to the menu screen, you can use Disk Utility to erase the hard drive.
The recovery system will remain, and I recommend that you erase the hard drive completely to remove the recovery system, too.
The only way to do THAT, is to boot to an external drive, which could be a USB OS X installer flash drive, with a OS X system that will boot your old iMac. When booted to that external drive, then erasing your internal drive will remove everything, including the recovery system.
 
Is this a wireless or USB keyboard? I've seen instances where a wireless keyboard won't work for recovery. The key inputs aren't recognized.
 
It is a USB keyboard, I had read instances when the keyboard wasn't recognised until later in the boot sequence so had tried delaying the key press until after the chime to see if that helped. Unfortunately it didn't.
 
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