unless you made it yourself (with eg CarbonCopyCloner...) then you need the disks. No hidden partition whatsoever :-( Try to get hold of a sys disk on ebay if you don't own one yourself.
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restore imac to factory defaults
Hi - I have an old imac - with os 9.2 - I would like to restore it to factory defaults - do I need a disk? - is there a recovery partition similar to some pc's?
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Answers
Some Imacs cant cope with OSX - and yes, it doesn't need a license key - apple were trusting enough of its users that if you had a mac you had paid the fee.
Unfortunately the latest version of Mac you can download is somewhere around 7.5 - any others you will need to get a disk for.
Once you have the disk its easy to reinstall - just hold down the 'c' key when starting up with the disk in the drive and then follow the instructions.
Good luck with finding a disk though
Download MAC OS up till 8something on the apple support site but can't do anything with 8.6 on those Mac's. Your talking about an old iMac, what model, on the support site you can check for all 10.x version if it'll work on yours and even explain how you can check version. Amongst my lot of MAC's I have an iMac 266mhz for the kid and it works fine with 10.2.8(9) even with a wireless USB stick. I honestly think your missing out on some nice features and best thing is to get a 10.1 or 10.2 disk on ebay for scraps.
Which Imac do you have? As long as you get it up to at least 512 mb of ram you could maybe even get up to 10.3.9. I have even run Tiger on DV se versions. You can also still load Clasic on it( if you have a bunch of of 0S appz on it you still like) though, if you do that, you will still have to get a copy of whichever flavor you want of clasic Mac. Lol Do you live in Durhm NC? I have tons of differerent imac disks. But, really, there is really no advantage to the older OS unless you just can't live without dealing with those bomb exploding with cryptic error number messages it used to throw.
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by: mc1arkePosted on 2007-06-05 at 01:25:07ID: 19215415
There is no recovery partition - macs come with an install disk which will return it to the factory state - unfortunatelly there is no other way of doing it