The iMac that I bought in 2009 has been retired.
A few months ago, we had a power outage and it didn't recover itself when the we regained power. I could not determine why it was having issues, but it would never fully boot up. It would take forever trying to get to the login screen and IF it would reach that point, would show the desktop but never fully log into the user account (beach ball was spinning and never stopped).
I was even having difficulty getting it into recovery mode. When it finally reached recovery mode, I found that a file was corrupted and wouldn't repair itself. I performed a drive check and it stated that there were errors and the errors were hindering the drive check. I opted to reinstall the disk using the recovery drive and it worked. There are no longer drive issues, but the drive has nothing on it.
I couldn't use it as it was and had an extremely difficult time even getting a copy of Mac OS. High Sierra was the highest supported version for that particular hardware, and since the system wasn't working properly, I couldn't use recovery mode to pull and reinstall any OS versions. It wouldn't see my older disks (I had two optical disks of Snow Leopard), either. I was not successful with creating a USB install disk using High Sierra, either. I tried creating a USB recovery disk using the App Store, but needed an Intel version of Mac OS, which I wasn't allowed to download using my Apple siliconed Macs (I tried with both the Mac Mini M1 and my Macbook Air M1 - it wouldn't work).
Since I was at my wit's end and since the system was 14 years old, I retired it. I've removed it's hard drive (a 1-TB Western Digital HDD) and will be putting it on the curb for rubbish removal this coming Monday. I'll put it within it's box in case anyone that wants to try to get it working can just take it home.
