Reinstalling Snow Leopard on an old iMac

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Your Mac's Specs
MacBook Air mid-2013 4GB, and other machines
Hey all, my mom has an old 2006 iMac
2GHz Intel Core Duo
2GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
Serial QP6280NVU2S
A neighbor or friend or someone wants to set it up as a kind of crude music server (just playing iTunes into speakers) so my mom wants to give it but wants it wiped first. Fine easy peasy
BUT
If I reformat the drive it won't work any more, it will need a fresh OS install. This can only accept OX X Snow Leopard 10.6.8 and while I could find a couple bootleg installer images, they did not work. And I cannot find it to download in the App Store (only updaters).

???

Another approach would be to just trash and secure delete all the stuff not related to the OS, however I'm not too confident of not leaving some of her personal stuff behind and/or logged in, or mistakenly erasing OS files.
 

chscag

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2017 27" iMac, 10.5" iPad Pro, iPhone 8, iPhone 11, iPhone 12 Mini, Numerous iPods, Monterey
That model came pre-installed with Tiger (10.4.X). Do you have the original installation disks?

Also, Amazon has the original Snow Leopard retail install disk for sale.

Robot Check
 
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H
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That model came pre-installed with Tiger (10.4.X). Do you have the original installation disks?
Alas no, not anywhere I see in her attic. I'll look at Amazon, I'm only here until Saturday but if all else fails I could order that for the future...thanks!
 
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Maybe you could throw Ubuntu/Linux or something on it just for music?
 
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Snow Leopard was replaced by Lion in late 2011. But yes, 2006 machines shipped with Tiger. So you can install any version of Snow Leopard on that machine. I have two Snow Leopard 10.6.8 virtual boot disks I keep on a couple portable hard drives for booting. I run Snow Leopard and High Sierra on separate partitions on all my MacBook Pros, including two early 2011 17" models. They are the last to run Snow Leopard (and the last year they made 17" laptops). Snow Leopard was the last true OS X before it became OS-ified. So I like having both, especially since Snow Leopard was the last to run Rosetta which lets me run some earlier apps I use for business. It was also a very stable OS X version, lasting a few years before Lion replaced it. I have both installed on both my 17" MBPros, but usually keep one in High Sierra and one in Snow Leopard.
 
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hey bro, download Snow Leopard full iso, make a usb bootable key & install to your mom's iMac, should be pretty straight forward, let me know if you need advice or image itself ;)
 

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