OS X Recovery failure.

[DKLurifax]

I was so careless to promise my friend to take a look at his imac 24" early 2008.

It freezes randomly on normal use and he wanted a clean install of his os. Now, I followed apple's guide and deleted everything on the drive and then went to reinstall via system restoration tool. I type in his id and pass but keep getting" this service is temporarily unavailable "

A bit of Google tells me that Apple wants you to reinstall from within the running OS but that wasn't possible due to the freeze issues. All I get from support is that I should take it to a care center and pay them to do it, which I'm not going to.

Next is a bootable USB but that requires another Mac computer or a very complicated way in windows. I'd rather not do that so is there any other way of getting the OS back on that computer without all this ridiculous hazzle?

[Snickerzz]

you can get a vm of osx on windows and make the usb that way, bit of hassle but should take more than an hour

[Guest]

On a bit of googling, this seams to be a solution working for many people with the same problem:

 

 

My problem has been solved after contacting Apple Care Support. Mountain Lion was not available and they informed me that we would need to reinstall Lion. They had me go through a process to force to my 2011 MacBook Pro to start directly from Apple’s servers. I restarted my Mac while holding  Command+Option+R until I saw a spinning globe appear along with a message about the recovery mode. Upon completion of the recovery the computer rebooted automatically and I then setup my account and finalized the settings in OS X Lion. Afterwards I was able to effortlessly upgrade to OS X Maverick 10.9.4.

 

Thank you Apple for the three follow up calls to verify that everything was running smoothly during the three hour process. It's service like yours that keeps your customers coming back.

 

Sincerely, EMRTECH.

 

Source: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6476417

[DKLurifax]

Thanks for the reply Spook, but it still says that the service is temporarily unavailable. 

 

I would never have imagined that you could hardlock yourself out of your own product that you bought and paid for like that.

[Guest]

Thanks for the reply Spook, but it still says that the service is temporarily unavailable. 

 

I would never have imagined that you could hardlock yourself out of your own product that you bought and paid for like that.

 

Hmm ok, what version of OSX is it running?

 

Edit: Give this a go. I had a similar issue when I was installing Mac OS X 10.9 and OS X 10.10 which turned out to be an incorrect system time.

 

Reboot your machine, and hold Command-Option-O-F during the boot process to access the Open Firmware prompt. Most likely, the real time clock is aliased in OF as rtc, so the command is this: 

decimal dev rtc sec min hour day month year set-time 

[DKLurifax]

Hmm, wont open the firmware prompt. I just get to the system recovery program. I tried using the command in terminal but that didnt work.

[DKLurifax]

Just created a bootable USB and I still get the same message. Wth is this?

 

Edit: Just created the boot drive in transmac witout a problem and it still requires internet acces and apple ID/Pass and I still get the same message?

[Guest]

Just created a bootable USB and I still get the same message. Wth is this?

 

Edit: Just created the boot drive in transmac witout a problem and it still requires internet acces and apple ID/Pass and I still get the same message?

 

Hmm not too sure then i'm afraid, try posting on the official Apple Community forum, they're usually pretty good.