No Lion for You

Our five year old iMac died a couple of weeks ago. I applied a security update and it never came back. Please don't let this scare anyone from installing updates, especially those related to security! It's just there comes a time where a computer wears out, and this was our iMac's time. It turned out to be the hard drive (HDD).

The 17" Intel iMac

However, being the near computer-whiz I am, I decided to attempt a fix. It can't be too hard to replace a HDD, right? Wrong. (This guide does  a good job of explaining it and the author still answers questions - nearly four years later!) So I decided to go the easy route - external HDD. My dad came over to help, and we got started...and immediately ran into an obstacle: I didn't have the install/recovery disc anymore. The original Intel iMacs ran OS X, Tiger version, which I had upgraded to Leopard and Snow Leopard. Since I was planning an upgrade to Lion soon, we performed a quick maneuver and created a bootable usb drive for the new OS, Lion!

Lion is a big set of files, somewhere between 3 and 4 GB, so it took a while to download. When it finished, we followed these instructions to create the bootable usb drive. The next step wasn't quite as successful. When we plugged the drive in the dead iMac, the drive was not recognized properly and it wouldn't boot. What went wrong? The processor. From what I've read so far, Lion only works on 64-bit processors and the early Intel iMacs were 32-bit.

There might be some hope, though, for this computer. My sister has one and, hopefully, still has her recovery disc. From there it's just a couple of upgrades and we'll be back in business!

My encounter with a Lion denial reminds me of this clip, which is where the title for this post came.