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I have a 27" 1TB iMAC Serial Number YD13804QDB6. My granddaughter wants to take it to her house. What is the BEST and EASIEST way to reset it back to factory settings? Would it be buying a OS X CD to start from the beginning? Please help. She is a sweetie pie. Thank you so very much.
This isn’t an Internet Recovery machine, but it is a recovery partition model. You will need to refer to this guide to make install media. You can take it up to Sierra (10.12) or High Sierra (10.13), which is something you and your granddaughter need to talk about. If you truly have a 2014, you can also use internet recovery. I would try Sierra since the APFS opt-out is a little end user unfriendly and only use High Sierra if you have to and can figure out the APFS bypass. APFS is designed for SSDs; not hard drives. I run High Sierra on my 2011 MBP, but I also got around the APFS conversion by downloading my copy from the dosdude patch tool - the Sierra tool can be found here. Don’t waste time with a DVD; 16GB USB drives are usually ~$5 with 32GB drives being ~$7-8 and easily worth the extra bucks if you can afford it. Also, take a backup of the files before you erase it since they will be lost. Get a 2-4TB external hard drive and use Time Machine for the job.
