Prep of an iMac for resale
Posted: January 27th, 2013, 3:56 pm
I'm getting a G4 iMac ready to sell (I'm not willing to give up the G4 "Sunflower" form factor so I found a faster one with a larger display). You'd think a 10-year old mac user would know what to do, but no dice; as a non-techie I need some step-by-step guidance.
I bought it used 18 months ago with 10.5.8 installed. The prior user swept it pretty clean beforehand and set up a 15 GB bootable "Recovery" partition on the hard drive in addition to the 105 GB "OS X" partition from which it boots. I imagine this is the key to putting the machine back the way I got it. I think what I want to do is boot from the Recovery partition, then overwrite the current main partition with another version of the recovery partition. Questions:
1. Can I do this from Disk Utility or do I need other software to proceed?
2. What are the steps I need to follow to proceed?
I added wifi via a RALink micro-USB device, and installed drivers (currently there's a RALink folder in my Utilities folder). RALink was acquired by another company so I'd rather the drivers convey.
3. Even if so, I'd like wifi to work from buyer boot-up. Is there a way I can put those drivers into the recovery partition so they're available to the buyer?
Thanks in advance for helping a relative newbie...
I bought it used 18 months ago with 10.5.8 installed. The prior user swept it pretty clean beforehand and set up a 15 GB bootable "Recovery" partition on the hard drive in addition to the 105 GB "OS X" partition from which it boots. I imagine this is the key to putting the machine back the way I got it. I think what I want to do is boot from the Recovery partition, then overwrite the current main partition with another version of the recovery partition. Questions:
1. Can I do this from Disk Utility or do I need other software to proceed?
2. What are the steps I need to follow to proceed?
I added wifi via a RALink micro-USB device, and installed drivers (currently there's a RALink folder in my Utilities folder). RALink was acquired by another company so I'd rather the drivers convey.
3. Even if so, I'd like wifi to work from buyer boot-up. Is there a way I can put those drivers into the recovery partition so they're available to the buyer?
Thanks in advance for helping a relative newbie...