Bricked late 2014 Intel iMac: troubleshooting recovery and installation issues

Question

Bricked late 2014 Intel iMac: troubleshooting recovery and installation issues

My Late 2014 Intel iMac is bricked. On boot a circle with a slash appears with "support.apple.com/mac/startup" displayed below the circle. Tried all of the following with no success:

Command + R boot fails to bring on recovery menu
Option + Command + R network recovery fails as it fails to connect to internet even though my mac mini is working fine on the same wifi network
Holding Shift key on boot fails to bring up any menu even though I have a samsung FIT drive with TINU created mac os installer inserted in one of the USB slots in back of the iMac. Tried both Big Sur and Monterey installers too!
Tried creating install USB manually but cannot boot to that either
Tried to boot to a different USB drive but it also failed
Tried a different USB port on iMac but that failed
Holding letter D key on boot lets me do a diagnostic test which actually passes!
Resetting NVRAM with Option+Command+P+R has no effect
Resetting SMC by pulling out power cable to iMac has no effect
Have wired keyboard so probably not keyboard issue

Any suggestions would be most welcome as I am at this point pretty frustrated.

Thank you!

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Earlier Mac models

Posted on May 28, 2025 05:42 AM

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Answer 1

May 29, 2025 06:22 AM in response to erickdobrasil

If you have a bootable drive connected to USB port you don’t seem to have held the Option key while booting. Doing that it should then show the external drive etc and so be able to choose that external drive to boot from.

Failing that a very long shot - how about “mucking around” with the RAM such as re-seating or using less in different slots. You'd expect 'beeps' if a RAM problem but worth a try anyway.

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Answer 2

May 29, 2025 08:01 AM in response to Need_help_give_help

Actually, I did hold the Option key down when rebooting several times and kept holding it but never could get any menu.

However, I did try once again to restore using Shift+Option+Command+R and this time I was able to restore the OS. It was restored to Catalina. I have tried this several times before but no luck until today.

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Answer 3

May 29, 2025 01:04 PM in response to erickdobrasil

Just to wrap this up I was finally able to restore a virgin Big Sur onto my iMac by using Shift+Option+Command keys during boot. However, I was not able to go into recovery mode using Option+R to restore a Time Machine backup on an external SSD. I was able to work around this by running this command from the live Big Sur using the Terminal app:

sudo nvram internet-recovery-mode=RecoveryModeDisk && sudo reboot

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