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I have bought a second hand iMac (mid 2007 version), and the previous owner has erased the hard drive.

It does have a recovery partition which offers an install of MacOS X El Capitan. However, this seems to be tied to the previous owner's Apple ID, and just gives a "This item is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later" error if I try to install and sign in with my Apple ID.

According to some online pages, if I go to the help option in the recover partition, I should be able to sign in to iCloud to fix this, but the iCloud website just loads a blank white screen (I guess because the in-built Safari is too old?)

So, I think I need to create a more "generic" installer to get MacOS running on the hard drive.

Apple has made a DMG file with MacOS X Mountain Lion available here:

https://support.apple.com/kb/DL2076?locale=en_US

It feels like it should be possible to turn this into something I can install from, but I haven't managed to find any usable instructions so far.

Unfortunately I don't have a second Mac, so am stuck to what can be done with Windows (or an iPad, iPhone or Linux, but I don't think any of those will help)

So is there a method available to do this?

Alternatively, is there any way that works to get the El Capitan install to be available to my Apple ID?

The suggested duplicate question is primarily talking about how to upgrade/downgrade the Mac OS version on a working Mac. There is an article linked from there for "How do I create a Mac bootable USB drive using Windows", but the contents of the Mountain Lion DMG that is available from Apple don't seem to match the answers there well (and those are for different versions of MacOS, so it is probably not surprising), so it would be hard to apply those answers to that version, particularly for a MacOS novice

Michael Firth
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  • See - https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/309399/how-can-i-download-an-older-version-of-os-x-macos/309400#309400 - which covers acquisition & creation of installers. It's got quite sprawling over the years, but does contain all you should need. – Tetsujin Mar 27 '23 at 09:06
  • Your question has been marked as a duplicate of Tetsujin's question. If you follow the links given in the accepted answer, you will find this answer, which explains how to make a bootable El Capitan installer from Windows. – David Anderson Mar 27 '23 at 11:58
  • The procedure for making a bootable Mountain Lion from Widows is much simpler that El Capitan. I do not think I have posted such an answer myself. However, I do believe such answers have been already posted here a Ask Different and elsewhere at other sites. Actually, if you can boot to an El Captain version of Recovery, then you may be able to download and install Mountain Lion without the use of a Windows machine. I do not have time right now to look for an already posted answer or post one myself. Maybe, later today I will post an answer, if you have not indicated you solved your problem. – David Anderson Mar 27 '23 at 12:09
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    It might be helpful if you could post the output from the command diskutil list. You should be able to enter this command in a Terminal window while booted to El Capitan Recovery. – David Anderson Mar 27 '23 at 12:12
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    I did manage to get Mountain Lion installed, with a process that involved moving the USB stick back and forth a couple of times. I will try and repeat what I did, and try the same for El Capitan, and if I feel I have something useful, I will add an answer on one of the questions – Michael Firth Mar 27 '23 at 12:46
  • You might want to consider installing a current Linux or Windows 10. However, this would probably require more than standard 1 GB of memory came 2007 iMacs. – David Anderson Mar 27 '23 at 13:17
  • Have you checked balenaEtcher? https://www.balena.io/etcher#download-etcher it has worked for me to create bootable disks for Mac. It has macOS and Windows versions. – Jaime Santa Cruz Apr 14 '23 at 00:57
  • As the re-open review doesn't allow me to add a proper comment as to why - The OP asks if working with El Cap rather than ML would change how this all works; answer yes, you can follow the linked guides for El Cap, because the Install ESD file is where all the guides expect it to be. No Apple ID required to download the .dmg – Tetsujin Apr 14 '23 at 11:44

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