Chosen Solution
The motherboard on my imac went bad so I purchased a complete motherboard on ebay. Same model but an i7 processor rather than the i5. Except that when I got it I found out its EFI locked and it’s a mid 2011 so the ram trick won’t work. I have read through how to reprogram or clear the password on the chip but thinking it will be easier to just swap the unlocked chip on my old board to the new. Because it’s the same model and the serial number on the old board is mine and it’s trash i shouldn’t have to do any programming that way right? Thoughts?
Happy to update I swapped the chip and it worked perfectly. With a hot air solder gun the process took about 5 min. My iMac is back up and running. I would post pictures and video of the process but to your point, I don’t want to encourage unethical EFI chip swaps.
If its EFI locked you should return it to the seller and get your money back as it came from a stolen iMac! Are you sure the main logic board is bad? Maybe it’s only the graphics card which you could swap out with the other board to at least test. If it is then you could return the board and just get a replacement GPU card. That would be cheaper and you would be doing the right thing here not rewarding a chop shop that handles stolen systems.
