No Destination Available When Uploading OSX On Wiped Mac

Yolopaku wrote:

I checked the hard drive and ran a check on it with disk utility (disc verification)with the "OSX Base System" checking out as ok with no errors.

That is the virtual volume for the macOS installer 99% of the time except for the occasional aborted installation which may leave that behind on the physical internal drive.

Unfortunately Apple hides the truth from their users. Within Disk Utility you need to click "View" and select "Show All Devices" before the physical drives appear on the left pane of Disk Utility.

Yolopaku wrote:

My Mac 21.5 was bought used with a wiped HD. When I install OSX the hard drive or destination does not show to select. What do I do?

Would a jump drive work?

If you have followed HWTech's suggestion for View=>Show All Devices in Disk Utility and only that Base System volume shows, then it seems likely that the internal drive has failed. Which could be why the computer was being sold used. However there is a big difference between a "wiped" drive and a "failed" drive. A "wiped" drive can be used, a "failed" drive cannot be used. While you may be able to boot from an external, that is a suboptimal setup for a variety of reasons.

If you want to boot from an external "jump drive," the only one available commercially that I think would provide acceptable performance is OWC's 1.0TB OWC Envoy Pro mini USB 3.2 (10Gb/s) USB-C + USB-A Bus-Powered Portable SSD. This device looks like a jump drive but it actually performs like a fast SSD and can provide 1 GB/s (10 Gb/s) throughput. If your internal drive is failed you will also need storage on the boot drive, note that OWC offers these drives in 1 TB and 2 TB sizes. I use one of these Envoy Pro mini drives, but back when I purchased it they were priced at less than 1/2 today's price.

OWC also offers other very small external SSDs that are very fast and can be used to boot your Mac. As do other manufacturers, such as WD, Samsung, etc. You want one that is reliable. You can assess that by checking what the warranty is, if it is 3 years or 5 years, that indicates that the manufacturer stands behind their product. Or you can check large resellers (like Amazon, Best Buy, etc.) and look for user rating that are 4.5/5 stars and include thousands of customer ratings.

Hi,

Try to reset NVRAM as well as SMC which your iMac could finds internal HDD. If it can't work, I agree with Rudegar's comment.

Reset NVRAM on your Mac - Apple Support

Reset the SMC of your Mac - Apple Support

Have you tried to reformat it from disk utility?

Add an external HDD or SSD, install macOS on that, boot, and see if things work adequately for your needs.

Use an external SSD as your startup disk … - Apple Community

my experience of not volume as a destination being available was because the internal hard drive was defective.

Yolopaku wrote:

Would a jump drive work?

Not unless it is a very fast USB3 USB stick from SanDisk which has write speeds of at least 150MB/s (better is one rated at 400MB/s). These USB sticks tend to be quite expensive and hard to identify as these details are not usually clear on the product pages.

Much better to get an actual USB3+ SSD although these are now very expensive since last year due to the AI craze raising the prices.

Most USB sticks are very slow even when advertised as "USB3" (it is a marketing gimmick to trick people). Even if a USB stick has faster reads, their writes are extremely slow. Slow writes is what makes most USB sticks impossible to use a boot drive. The last time I was able to use a regular USB stick as a macOS boot drive was one or two decades ago when USB2 was the fastest USB protocol available (the internal Hard Drives were only a bit faster at the time).

I checked the hard drive and ran a check on it with disk utility (disc verification)with the "OSX Base System" checking out as ok with no errors.

Would a jump drive work?

A USB flash drive might work short-term, but I would not rely on one as a long-term startup drive.