TR Forums

Hello everyone and good morning,
I have no experience with apple computer and a friend of my wife is having some kind of problems " no clue what they are yet" with her iMac. My question, Is there a easy way to restore it back to out of the box factory settings like a windows laptop?

As of yet I do not have any clue on what year or model it is besides it is a iMac which I consider to be a non portable laptop sorta:) I do not know if you hit keys during bootup like when restoring windows or their is some other procedure you have to do since I am totally clueless on the Apple PC front. So any help will be greatly appreciated and once I know what the problem is in the 1st place I will immediately post again updating the thread. I was just hoping to get a head start on restoring the whole system and hoping it is not a hardware issue. I just hope it is not older than 2012.

Thanks ahead of time, I know I did not give you much to go on but once I know i will update the thread right away.

Assuming this iMac is running 10.7 (Lion, from 2011) or later, the recovery partition will let you do it. Every Intel-based iMac is capable of running Lion except for the original Core Duo models.

When rebooting, hold the Command key (clover flower) + R. That should boot you into the recovery partition. At that point you can fire up Disk Utility (might look on the Utilities menu if one is available). Highlight the main partition and click Erase, then reinstall OS X.