I have an extra Mac. A bit older but in good condition. 2012, 21.5” iMac. I replaced the HD last year with a new SSD. I'm giving it to my friends wife so I wiped it and restored it to the factory settings. Was working perfectly fine last week. When I tryin install OS X Lion on it so she can get started using it, it doesn’t find the HD. I used disk utility and everything is fine. But I can’t see the HD when rebooting to install OS X. What do I do?
iMac
If you have a spare USB drive, you can make a bootable Catalina disk and instal that instead. Lion is a bit outdated. You can put the USB drive into the iMac after you make it and hold down the alt key when you turn it on to choose the boot disk. Here is the steps for it:
How to create a bootable installer for macOS - Apple Support
If you did want to go with Lion though, just make sure that when you erase the SSD that you choose GUID and Mac OS Extended for Lion to see the SSD.
What OS were you running on the iMac before trying to instal Lion? I ask this, because the 2012 iMac can go up to Catalina which uses a different file format (APFS). My thought is that if you formatted the SSD to APFS and then tried to instal Lion, it can't see the SSD because it's looking for GUID.
If you can/want, try installing Catalina instead. Or go back into Disk Utility in the setup and reformat it to GUID.
This may not be necessary in this case, but you may have to go to "View" and "Show All Devices" in disk utility. This way you are formatting the full SSD and not just the partition within.
I had updated to the latest OS it was capable of running. Catalina. Don’t remember which version.
how can I install Catalina? It prompts me to install Lion when updating. Can I put a Catalina install file on an external or flash drive and run that somehow when booting up?
im not opposed to formatting the drive. It’s wiped anyway. Nothing on it I need.
Can’t re-install OS on an old mac
