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dogbird

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 5, 2018
4
0
A friend of mine who is a Pc repair guy with not much Mac experience replaced my dead HD in an early 08 iMac with a Samsung Evo 860 SSD. We did not format the disc. When I try to boot from old install discs I just get the folder with ? mark. I tried to boot from a bootable drive I made by partitioning out part of an external HD but all when I turn on and hit command R with the bootable drive, I get the apple logo for about 10 minutes and then it restarts itself. Am I doomed since we didn't format the drive or is there a way to do it after it's been installed. I have zero skill when it comes to this stuff and am hoping not to have to ask my friend to take it all apart again. Thanks, everybody.
 

SecuritySteve

macrumors 6502a
Jul 6, 2017
949
1,082
California
So, in order to install macOS on your Evo 860 you would've had to reformat it to HFS+ or APFS. Otherwise there is no boot volume, and that is why you can't boot.
 

jerwin

Suspended
Jun 13, 2015
2,895
4,652
Provided that you have a bootable volume attached, restart your mac, and when you hear the chime, press option. Select that volume, and boot into macos. Then you can do things such as reformatting the 860, installing the system, etc.
 

dogbird

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 5, 2018
4
0
Provided that you have a bootable volume attached, restart your mac, and when you hear the chime, press option. Select that volume, and boot into macos. Then you can do things such as reformatting the 860, installing the system, etc.
Thanks, I created a bootable Mountain lion drive however it's a Partioned section in big hard Drive. The hard drive has another partition that has lots of data on it and a separate partition with just the bootable drive. Does the bootable drive need to be an isolated USB? Could that be the problem?
 
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