Friend having trouble with Late 2009 iMac

[Dennis S]

He has 10.6.8 on it and tried to download El Capitan and got the blinking question mark.

[rjmacs]

Boot from USB El Cap installer stick.

[d4]

He made a full back up right?

[Dennis S]

d4 wrote:
He made a full back up right?

He said he did.

[Dennis S]

We're not sure if he should be upgrading to El Capitan or High Sierra or something else.

[Sarcany]

2009 is likely to have a bad hard drive. Did the friend do any sort of health-check before trying to upgrade?

...Are you available for in-person tech support for your friend?

[Dennis S]

Sarcany wrote:
2009 is likely to have a bad hard drive. Did the friend do any sort of health-check before trying to upgrade?

...Are you available for in-person tech support for your friend?

He has been using the HD with OS 10.6.8. I am not close by and don't know enough to help him.

[PeterW]

I don’t see how merely downloading an installer could do that. Wonder what he really did.

Anyhoo, tell him to restore from the backup, make sure everything is back to normal and then try again.

[Sarcany]

Under 10.6.8, there's no Recovery volume.

If El Cap was successfully installed then there may be a Recovery volume. Can try to boot with Command+R held down to get there and run the Disk Utility's "First Aid" check on the drive.

If Recovery is unavailable then first thing I'd do is to boot to an external drive to evaluate the boot drive with SMART Utility and Disk First Aid and maybe DiskWarrior. If your friend was still running 10.6.8, I wouldn't expect your friend to have such resources.

Next option would be to bring the Mac into a certified Apple consultant for an evaluation/repair. This might not be a valid option, depending on the state of the COVID-19 quarantine in the area.
https://consultants.apple.com/us/search

[NewtonMP2100]

.....if the 2009 iMac is late all the time.....would it help to get it a watch.......????