second hand mac

T

taylorwac

Registered
Hi All,

I have two macs that were given to me, one from work and one from a friend. One is a 20 inch imac (2 ghz,1G,250GB) the other a mac book pro(mid 2009). I have no OS on either of them . I have tried the internet recovery sequence Command, Opt R for both but can't seem to get that to work. I can get in to the recovery mode but whenever I try the reinstall option I get the error "This item is temporarily unavailable".

I assume the real error is "you have not purchased the OS so your computers are useless to you".

Is there anything I can do to get an OS installed on these machines or is it off to the dump?

Thanks
 
Internet Recovery mode is available on any Mac newer than 2010 models, so neither of your "new" Macs are new enough for that.
I suspect that the iMac is a mid-2007 model (which would originally have shipped with 1 GB of RAM (newer ones would have come with more RAM installed) The latest OS X system for that one is OS X 10.11.6 (El Capitan)
Both of those Mac COULD go to El Capitan - but the iMac needs more RAM. It CAN be upgraded to a max of 6GB total.
The spinning hard drive will not be happy on El Capitan, and you could upgrade that to an SSD.
The MBPro might have enough RAM already, but could be upgraded to 8GB, if you want to do that, and again, an SSD would be a great addition.
You shouldn't spend a lot of money to upgrade, but SSD prices keep going down. RAM might be the most expensive items.

But, how do you get there with an OS X system to install? Download that from Apple, from this page.
The installer will automatically start after it downloads, so quit it at that time.
Create a bootable USB, so you can use that bootable installer to install El Capitan on both of the Macs.
 
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