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iMac (Late 2009) Won't Reinstall Operating System

I have an iMac (Late 2009) that I have erased the hard drive and I'm trying to reinstall Mac OS High Sierra following these instructions. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204904 It gets 3 quarters of the way through the install and freezes. Any suggestions on what would be the best option to try next? I ran disk utilities and it didn't find anything wrong with my drive.

iMac 27″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Sep 27, 2021 10:06 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Sep 27, 2021 10:13 AM

Software reinstall might easily take well over an hour on your older iMac.

Have you allowed the process to continue even if it seems to have stalled?


See if you can run the process in Safe mode (hold the shift key down at startup). It can take much longer to safe boot (10 min) so be patient.

How to use safe mode on your Mac - Apple Support 


Safe mode forces the OS to clear certain caches and logs and do other miscellaneous housekeeping. It's non-destructive to user data so is safe to do. Very often certain weird software behavior is corrected by simply logging in this way as a troubleshooting method. When you're in safe boot, the machine will not be at its best performance, especially with graphics, but that's expected.


1 reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Sep 27, 2021 10:13 AM in response to melanee_cgd

Software reinstall might easily take well over an hour on your older iMac.

Have you allowed the process to continue even if it seems to have stalled?


See if you can run the process in Safe mode (hold the shift key down at startup). It can take much longer to safe boot (10 min) so be patient.

How to use safe mode on your Mac - Apple Support 


Safe mode forces the OS to clear certain caches and logs and do other miscellaneous housekeeping. It's non-destructive to user data so is safe to do. Very often certain weird software behavior is corrected by simply logging in this way as a troubleshooting method. When you're in safe boot, the machine will not be at its best performance, especially with graphics, but that's expected.


iMac (Late 2009) Won't Reinstall Operating System

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