Installing Mac OS to 2011 iMac new hard drive

Tech Support
1

Hey,

I’m struggling and need help. I have just swapped out my old optical drive in my 2011 iMac and I can’t get the operating system back on.
I have made a bootable version of El Cap onto a USB drive but it’s not seeing it.

I can get to recovery window and it says I can install Lion but when I click it it says I can’t get the components needed to run it.

Any help would be amazing.

2

Have you tried starting up, with the usb drive plugged in, holding down the Option key?

3

Hey there,

Yes I have tried that as well.

4

If you hold down command+option+R the recovery partition will go straight to the installer for the most up to date version of OSX/MacOS supported by your machine. It might be worth trying that to see if you can get the installer to run.

5

I shall try that right now.

Will let you know. Thanks so far

6

I have done it and after a screen showing a spinning world with a progress bar. It is now showing a white screen with black Apple logo. It doesn’t seem to be doing anything else.

It has been on this screen for about 10 minutes.

Should it be doing this or something different?

7

is it this screen?

image
image1021×634 12.2 KB

If so, than it should be the right one.

8

The process should look something like this video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77NKImxpjpI.

9

It worked.

Thanks for all your help everyone. My very small brain hit a wall.

Thank you!

2 Likes
10

Glad to hear it is working again.