Fresh Install and Device Failure?

[Skeptical.me]

Hi,

Today I did a fresh install of macOS 12 on my 2017 iMac 27" 5k i5 3.5Ghz Intel

Before I installed from Recovery I erase the disk and renamed it, disk utility successfully erased it.

After completing, the mac booted into macOS briefly and was terribly slow, so I decided to reboot the mac.

Then I was confronted by this screen:

So, my question is ... has my mac died?

And to be honest I have not seen a screen like this before.

Edit:

At boot I can't even Command > R into recovery drive.

Edit 2:

When I press Option at boot, this is what I see (I've never had Windows on this mac.

Edit 3:

I just plugged in my external SSD boot drive and after selecting Option at boot I am only given the option for Windows which leads to the blue screen. I am utterly baffled.

Edit 4:

The USB ports aren't working.

It has 3 months of AppleCare+ left

 

[Mike Boreham]

Baffling indeed! The blue screenshot is a Windows screen. There is a Windows volume on that machine somewhere!

What does Disk Utility show?

The fact that option+boot is not showing a Mac boot volume implies that the Mac volume is not bootable.

Can you do Option+cmd+R? (ie Internet Recovery).

 

[Skeptical.me]

Baffling indeed! The blue screenshot is a Windows screen. There is a Windows volume on that machine somewhere!

What does Disk Utility show?

The fact that option+boot is not showing a Mac boot volume implies that the Mac volume is not bootable.

Can you do Option+cmd+R? (ie Internet Recovery).

What's even more baffling is that I don't own a copy of Windows installation media!

Option+cmd+R worked, and I was able to use my external SSD to install and get things working again! Thanks for your suggestion.

I have absolutely no idea how this happened.