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Hi! My Hard Drive crashed and I replaced it with a same brand, same capacity drive (Seagate 1TB). When I tried installing the OS from a Snow Leopard DVD, the optical drive would not boot from it. The optical drive had problems before, it wouldn’t burn cds or dvds and it would have problems reading dvds. I booted from internet recovery since my imac had Mountain Lion. I went ahead and formatted my new HD, as Mac Os journaled, and it worked but when I tried to restore the OS on my HD, it says I need to log in with the apple account used to install Mountain Lion. (I took it to a local iShop last time I had hard drive problems and they updated my Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion and I don’t have their account). I even tried booting from USB with a copy of Snow Leopard according to this link and I got it to chime with the apple logo, but it stayed like that for hours and no progress from there. Also tried Disk Utility from Internet Recovery and got it to read the OSX installation DVD. Went ahead and rebooted from that drive but didn’t get further than the chime and the apple logo. I was wondering if its possible to install the OS on my new drive using a dock and installing it from a same model imac (I have another one at my office). I read somewhere about doing something similar. Could this be a solution? Don’t know what else to do =( help me please!
You can clone (restore) a valid OS from one mac to your new drive. Connect the two machines via firewire. Target boot the good one, then boot the one with the new drive. It will find a valid boot drive, but if it doesn’t reboot with the option key down and choose the drive with the OS on it. From Applications/Utilties launch DiskUtility:DFA-chose restore tab… drop the icons in the appropriate place and restore. This will copy the user account - you’ll have to disconnect the machines reboot the one with the new drive, log in and create a new master user account… then you can delete the cloned one. If this Answer is helpful please remember to return and mark it Accepted.
Mountain Lion is a paid upgrade. Did you try putting in your Apple ID and password?
