PCer's first time inside a Mac.

[alexianmartin]

So we bought my grandma a new macbook air for Christmas a while back. She recently had a late 2006 21" iMac. It was just sitting in the corner only taking up space. I decided to play with it.

The original problem was OS was extremely laggy and lame. Typical aging technology crap. Well it got to the point where I couldn't do anything. After logging in, the desktop would freeze. Couldn't get into Disk Utility at all. Having the expeirence of building PC's for the last decade, I thought I'd just boot externally and reinstall OS lion. (It seemed to work ok back when lion was installed). I could not get the mac to see a boot usb stick. So I took the 500gb WD HDD out, and formatted it from my pc.

If you're reading this, I hope you see where my mistake was. I now have a hard drive that will not work in the mac. I've tried using multiple programs to load disk images or OS lion, or fromat for mac with Transmac etc...
With the hdd formatted into fat32 with AOMEI Partition and a boot image stick made with transmac, the mac sees both drives. It even sees the usb as a boot drive. But when I select it, I get the circle with a line through it.

Any help will be appreciated. I just want to get a basic OS back on it that will be sufficient for extremely light internet browsing.

Thanks,
Alex

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

Hi alexianmartin, I have the exact same iMac so I can understand what you did & why.

I recommend you source a Mac OS X 10.4.x Lion disc which was the original OS version & boot from it so you can reformat the hd correctly. Insert the DVD then press C & reboot. Navigate to Disk Utility in the menu & choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled) from the format list.

Apple Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.6

 

[honestone]

I wonder if he should just connect the hard drive (I assume it is inside an external enclosure, and that enclosure has at least a USB port) to his grandma's MacBook Air and use Disk Utility there to Erase and Format the HDD. Assuming the MacBook Air is running an OS later than Snow Leopard, he can download Lion (or any other later OS that would work on the iMac) for free from the App store, and install it onto the HDD.

 

[Silvio Demilio]

I agree with honest one except ditch the hdd. Buy a new ssd, a cheap enclosure such as the xmas special 99 c one from owc. Use the air to dl the latest OS X from the App Store. Format the ssd , then remove it from the case out it in iMac with I assume an ssd cradle - never worked on an iMac then install new OS X onto iMac alibi tot more effort but way better with ssd