New To Mac

[LordOdin]

You cannot unmount the drive from which you are booted. Hence the need for a bootable external drive, either a real drive or a thumb drive. Or use the Internet Recovery process and use Disk Utility from there as again, you won't be booted from a drive, but the Internet.

Going to put a SSD in, in the next couple of days, tried external drives and pen drives and they all take me to the same disk utility page, same thing over and over again, i can't get the Mac to boot from an external source. When i plug an external device in and press the option key it takes me to a screen with a picture of a HDD with Recovery underneath in writing, nothing else to boot from. Found the model number which is A1224 and EMC is 2266, that's the main reason i am switching to a SSD, the age of it will make it slow.

 

[MacInWin]

Ok, that is an early or mid 2009 iMac, so pretty old. Came originally installed with El Capitan (OS X 10.11.6). Just to be sure, pressing the Option key needs to be held down until the various boot options appear. If you don't do that and if the Recovery partition is the only one on the drive, that is what it will boot into. From your description, that is apparently what is happening. Are you holding down the Option key from power on until you see the options? Ditto for getting into Internet Recovery, you have to hold down the keys until you see that it is asking for login data for your network to get to the Internet. If you are consistently NOT getting to the various devices either they are NOT bootable or you aren't holding down the key(s) long enough.

 

[LordOdin]

I have been holding command option till the progress bar reaches around 50%, pretty sure the boot disks are alright though it's possible maybe one didn't work, i usually download the Bootable file then put it on the External Hard Drive i have or the Pen Drive i have. I am pretty sure i have held the options key right up to the Recovery Drive appearing.

 

[LordOdin]

Tried again, held option and it still came up with Recovery Disk, no black screen with options to choose. I am not going to try again until i have put a new ssd in it.

 

[ferrarr]

If it is a 2009 iMac, it came preinstalled with Snow Leopard. El Capitan was released in September 2015.

 

[LordOdin]

From what i know it came installed with Yosemite, my sister isn't very technical so wouldn't have changed the OS @ferrarr , it always comes up with Install Yosemite but it won't let me with it wanting a Password. I have tried my own apple id and get the 6 digit code which i enter and it comes back as unavailable and try later. Thats why i am going to put a ssd in it, plus it should speed it up a little hopefully.

 

[Rod]

The external drive you mentioned which opened Disk Utility again, if thats DU on an external drive that should allow you to erase the media unless its not really a bootable external drive. But it sounds like it was.

 

[LordOdin]

The external drive you mentioned which opened Disk Utility again, if thats DU on an external drive that should allow you to erase the media unless its not really a bootable external drive. But it sounds like it was.

I must be making the bootable drives wrong as they don't work. I have been using Transmac but they aren't booting. I am just waiting on a cradle for a ssd to arrive so i can put that in. Everything i have tried has failed so been a bit fed up about it. It's funny because i made a bootable drive for my Windows machine and it worked. It helps that you can change boot source in bios but you can't do that on Mac can you ?.

 

[MacInWin]

To change boot source on the Mac, hold down the Option key as it boots. Keep holding it down until the options appear. If the usb drive is, in fact, bootable, it should appear. Transmac has a miserable success record, however, so your best bet is probably an Internet Recovery, read this: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314

Again, the various keys have to be HELD DOWN, not just clicked, during the boot process.

 

[chscag]

It helps that you can change boot source in bios but you can't do that on Mac can you ?.

Macs do not have a BIOS, instead booting is controlled by EFI.

 

[MacInWin]

And if you want to "permanently" change the boot drive, it can be done in System Preferences. But in your context I think you meant just temporarily, in which case the Option key works just fine.