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Bought a iMac from a auction its a 2008 20" It’s been wiped and getting a flashing folder, what do I need to do ??
You’ll need to find a friend with a Mac to help you here. You’ll need connect your system to his using a FireWire cable and then putting your system in Target Mode. That will allow you to use his Mac to install the OS onto the drive. Your other options here are: Order from Apple the grey recovery disksIf you can find a retail version of Lion or Mountain Lion that will allow you to boot up under the optical drive.Find a FireWire external HD which you can prep up as a bootable drive using your friends Mac Some of the things you also may want to do to make this more workable would be to max out this systems memory which is 6 GB (one 2 GB module & one 4 GB module). If you find the HD is not doing so well I would recommend replacing it with a Seagate SSHD hybrid drive. Otherwise you could encounter issues as this systems SATA port is limited to SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) with some of the newer drives on the market.
The easiest way to recover OS X to a new hard drive or if you want a fresh install with out a actual dvd. You can put your iMac into Recovery mode over internet. Use this guide from Apple support. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314 Jim
