I just got an iMac model A1224, not sure which configuration. On power up it gives a grey screen with a spinner. Sometimes it changes the background to blue but still a spinner, and nothing.
Bad hard drive? Needs a re-install? Any ideas? I'm not really that familiar with this era Mac.
I don't have a CD/DVD to do a boot and re-install or anything. I gather from quick searches online that the max this will do is 10.6. Looks like Apple wants $20 for a disc. Haven't looked to see if I can get one off eBay or something yet.
Also I got a Classic II. I haven't even tried to power that one on yet.
Looking at the bottom of the iMac again, it is an early 2009, EMC 2266 with 2.66GHz processor and according to what I find online it can run up to 10.11, which means it is more useful than I thought.
OK... I'm stuck again... I need to make a bootable USB of El Capitan. Why can't this be as simple as making a bootable USB for Ubuntu??? I've got access to a newer MacBook Pro that has Mojave on it. I have a 16GB USB drive... How the heck do I get the image onto there. I've tried all the steps online for formatting the USB drive for Mac using Disk Utility but the command to run the Install program isn't there in the Applications directory. Why oh why couldn't they just make a boot disk maker utility like Ubuntu that lets you select the image and USB drive... or just make it so you can just do it from the command line with dd....
I'll get this out of the way first - Open up that Classic II and recap it! Those are ticking timebombs. Hopefully the PRAM battery hasn't leaked... also the hard drive may be dead if it even has one.
As for your A1224 iMac, you could possibly have a bad hard drive. If it takes such an unusually long time to perform a task, (like 10-20 minutes for it to boot!) the hard drive may be the culprit. I'd replace that with an SSD... Also, you can use dosdude1's patcher to install High Sierra, but El Capitan is probably an easier choice. You want to find a copy of the installer online, probably from archive.org (using a download manager can fix slow speeds with archive.org) and then refer to this:
How to create a bootable installer for macOS - Apple Support
Hopefully that helps!
I'll look for the patcher, because I'm finding those instructions for making a boot USB for El Capitan don't work unless you have a machine that can run El Capitan. The newer MacBook Pro that I have access to that has Mojave on it fails to run the El Capitan installer program for making the boot media. That basically puts me between a rock and a hard place as the iMac won't boot up enough to do anything. The hard drive may be bad, or it may just be the OS on there is corrupted. I can't tell at this point. If I remember right these things came with an IDE style 3.5" drive instead of SCSI. I probably have a small < 500GB drive left over around here I could put in there if these things aren't so picky they only accept models of drive Apple used or only drives with Apple specific firmware like some older Apple machines do for some things.
I haven't even had a chance to look in the Classic II yet. Hopefully it has a Varta branded PRAM battery as those seem far less prone to leakage than most of the other brands Apple used. I have an extra 1/2AA size battery holder and I can buy a Lituium battery easy enough. I'm assuming it is the electrolytic caps you are talking about on the power supply/analog board? I don't remember these Macs having RIFA caps like an Apple II does. If that were it I have a whole bunch of those already. This Classic II has either a 40MB or 80MB drive in it, but probably a Quantum, and as you note, it unfortunately likely has stiction issues, as most of the < 200MB Quantums did. I'd have to research how to put a modern SSD into a SCSI-1 based machine. I'm sure there is a way to do it. However that may end up being a project for a future owner as I'm leaning towards putting it up for sale, probably eBay, along with the two G3 based toilet bowl style iMacs I have. Probably I will end up keeping only the Intel based iMac and getting rid of all the others.
The problem is a chicken and egg problem... You can't make a USB installer unless you have a working system that can run it. Really piss poor design on Apple's part. Probably intentional.
Thanks for the hint of archive.org. I was able to find a .iso of the Snow Leopard installer which got the machine up and running. Hard drive seems OK, the OS install on it was just trashed somehow. All the previous owner's old files I was able to archive off for them.
I'm thinking now that I can create an installer for El Capitan on this iMac... That's the next task now that I've saved off all the old data from it.
Now the next problem... Snow Leopard can't run the El Capitan installer! Damn, Apple you couldn't have made this more tediuous.
I'm downloading Lion to upgrade from Snow Leopard. Hopefully I can junp to El Capitan from there.
Of coure it couldn't be that easy/ Sbiw Leopard can't upgrade to Lion without installing updates first... Argggggh.
I really wish MacOS was 1/2 as easy to use as Linux.
Lion installer from archive.org doesn't work... so trying Mountain Lion now...
Mountain Lion also no bueno. I was able to download the Yosemite installer directly from Apple. Unfortunately while it claims to complete successfully, when the machine is rebooted it still appears to be running Snow Leopard. Several tries, same result. Againg, all the instructions for maling a bootable USB for Yosemite appear to work, but when trebooting holding down Option it doesn't show up in boot manager. Only version I've been able to make a booable USB that this machine will recognize so far has been Snow Leopard.
I'm about to give up on this thing and just put it out on eBay. It appears to be useless for what I wanted to run on it which requires at least El Capitan. It doesn't appear possible to make this thing run anything newer than Snow Leopard.
Have you tried Internet Recovery?
I finally got it to work... But it was a huge pain... I had to jump through a bunch of hoops before I could get El Capitan to install.
But I did, and the AppleSauce software seems to work...
Oh... I also upgraded the RAM to 8GB. The El Capitan installer kept failing when the machine only had 2GB in it. Despite that it supposedly should work with only 2GB, it doesn't seem to in reality. Maybe it would kinda sorta work once it was installed, but the installer doesn't seem to work in 2GB.