Newbie That Could Definately Use Some Good News...

[racfan9]

Good Afternoon All... Ok here's my situation. By the way first time to post. I recently picked up a mid 2011 Imac 21.5 at a local pawn shop for what I though was a crazy low price of $225.00. I got it home and realized it hadn't been reset to factory conditions so I started researching how to do a complete re-install of the operating system. Well as usual you tube had a "how to reset you Mac back to factory settings" So I watched it a few times and felt comfortable about trying it everything was going fine until I connected to the Apple website to download Mavericks. Well the reply was Temporarily Unavailable, Please try again later. So in the meantime I had already erased the hard drive and I didn't back anything up because I had nothing of importance on this computer.
Now originally this unit came with OS X Lion and had been upgraded to Mavericks, so I was under the impression that the original Lion system or installer would still be on the hard drive somewhere. Any idea on what I can try or is this something the local Apple store will need to fix. One other thing. Before this all went south I was getting notifications that a free upgrade to El Capitan was available. Is there some way I can download this system to my erased hard drive. By the way this is my first Apple computer, always had Microsoft Windows systems before and the worst thing about this is I'm not very tech savvy. Hope someone out there can take me under there wing and guide me through this.

racfan9

 

[luigi1234]

nn

 

[honestone]

OK, first, how did you Erase your internal drive? Also, did you format it too?

 

[racfan9]

I"m not sure of all the exact steps. My notes and instructions are at home and I'm at work. I believe I booted up into utilities, from there I remember having a screen that showed 2 drives, the HD and the Recovery. I click on HD from the left column also in the left column was the Recovery HD which had about 127 gb on it. Then back to the center of the screen was a box that that contained "Journaled", "Erase" and a couple others. I can't remember right of hand if I formatted the drive,again I'll get a little more precise this evening when I get home.

Terry

 

[honestone]

The Recovery HD partition should only show about 680 mb (not gig) of space used. The other stuff you are talking about would come from using Disk Utility.

In any event, we need a better explanation of what you did.

 

[racfan9]

Here is a pic of the screen that I used to erase the hard drive. And as far as your second question about formatting, I'm sure I didn't do that. The second pic is of the OS X base system. As you can see it has 1.22 gigs of info on it, What is this actually?

Terry

 

[racfan9]

Sorry just realized my pictures did not load. So here they are for the previous post. I'll send a few more pics of the actual sequence I used to do this tonight.

Terry

 

[honestone]

In order for you to have erased the Partition Macintosh HD, you would have needed to have booted to your machine "externally". The only way (in your situation) that can be done is to boot to the Recovery HD partition, and run Disk Utility from there.

I don't know what that second "OS X Base system" picture is, as I don't see that at all on either of my machines (I am using El Capitan).

Finally, it would be better if your Erase and Format the internal disk at that "top", ie, Volume, level. That would be done by choosing the "500.11 ...." disk, and Erase and Format that. Then, you would have 1 partition, and you can name that whatever you want. (Most folks name it "Macintosh HD", just as Apple does when they sell a brand new or refurbished machine with the OS already installed (as expected)).