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Long story short:

  • I have a good working iMac 2015 5K that I wanted to sell.
  • I cannot do an automated factory reset on this device, so I had to go through steps.
  • I accidentally wiped a wrong disk, at least I think I did.
  • After wiping I get the folder/question mark at startup.
  • I restart with COMMAND + R - To get a Wi-Fi list to choose from, I connect and download certain recourses.
  • It reboots in a menu where you can go back to OS X (El Capitan). But when it asks on which disk I want to install, there is nothing. I cannot continue.
  • I did the first aid on all 3 given disks (HDD / SD and recovery) and it showed green, no faults.

What should I do? Apple wanted to ship me off to a dealer, which costs me money. I know I did something 'wrong' but I need to get an OS back on my iMac. Any help is much appreciated.

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  • You likely blew up your Fusion drive. You’ll need to recreate it. I wrote the instructions in another answer. You’ll need to boot into Recovery (Cmd-Opt-R), open Terminal, then follow the instructions
    – Allan
    Commented May 29, 2023 at 11:34
  • What OS was on it last? If it was Mojave or later your disk will likely be formatted APFS, which El Capitan can't read. I'm surprised that Cmd/R asked for a connection, meaning it couldn't find an internal Recovery, and then fetched El Capitan. Try Cmd/Opt/R at boot, which should then fetch Monterey.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented May 29, 2023 at 15:25
  • 2
    Both @Allan and Speldrang1 need to be made aware that (Cmd-Opt-R) is used to attempt to boot macOS Recovery from the latest macOS that is compatible with your Mac. In this case, the latest would be Monterey. The macOS Monterey operating system does not have a diskutil corestorage create verb and therefore Allan's link to instructions in another answer could not be used as posted.
    – David Anderson
    Commented May 29, 2023 at 16:12
  • Thanks @DavidAnderson, I was thinking that Catalina would be installed on that model. Not sure where I misread the latest OS compatible
    – Allan
    Commented May 29, 2023 at 16:16
  • Speldrang1: Apple has a webpage How to fix a split Fusion Drive. This should cover whichever version of OS X/macOS Recovery you boot to. If you are not sure which version, then enter the sw_vers command to get the ProductVersion.
    – David Anderson
    Commented May 29, 2023 at 16:58

1 Answer 1

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I would simply try to boot from USB bootable installer. You can learn how to do this from here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372 Once booted from the USB installer, Open Disk Utility and format the internal Hard drive as Mac OS extended Journaled,Guid. Please note that while in disk Utility, you will want to make sure that "view" is set to "show all devices." make sure and erase/format the top most level internal hard drive. This will completely erase everything on that drive, even recovery partition. Once complete, exit disk utility, and select install mac os. If you still don't see your internal drive after this point most likely your internal hard drive or sata cable is bad, or you formatted incorrectly.

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