October 2009 iMac HD replacement

[weaverra]

I have a 27" 2009 iMac that wouldn't boot up. I went out and bought an SSD to replace the HDD. With the old HDD I would get the progress bar with the apple logo. When I replaced with the SSD I only get the folder with a question mark. The drive has OS High Sierra installed on it. I can't even boot the iMac to boot off of a USB drive. Don't quite understand what's going on. I even went so far as the replace the SATA cable. This iMac used to get really hot and I'm wondering if something overheated.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

Are you talking about when you install? How are you trying to get HS put on it?

 

[kschendel]

So the old HDD failed / didn't boot, correct? Were you able to get it to boot from anything (recovery partition, DVD, USB, whatever) after the HDD failed and before you opened it up? If not, it means that you can't really be sure that it was the HDD as opposed to something else. You need to find some known good medium (DVD, proven bootable USB, whatever), preferably for something older than High Sierra just in case it's HS being snooty about something, and see if your machine can boot at all. If you didn't clean all the dust and re-seat the memory sticks when you installed the SSD, take it apart again and do that.

 

[DeltaMac]

If you have installed a hard drive that was already loaded with the system - what do you see on the screen when you hold the option key during boot up?
You should get the option-boot screen, allowing you to select any bootable drive or partition. Click on the drive icon, and press return.

 

[weaverra]

If you have installed a hard drive that was already loaded with the system - what do you see on the screen when you hold the option key during boot up?
You should get the option-boot screen, allowing you to select any bootable drive or partition. Click on the drive icon, and press return.

I get a mouse cursor stuck in the middle of the screen. That’s all I get.

 

[DeltaMac]

Turn off power.
Press and release the power button, immediately holding the Option-Command-p-r
You should hear the boot chime sound. Keep holding the same 4 keys until you hear the boot chime two more times, then release all keys except Option/alt.
Do you have an Apple keyboard, or some other USB keyboard? If it has a Windows key, not an Apple command key, be sure to hold the alt key.
If you only get a grey screen, and nothing there but your cursor, then it's not recognizing that you have any device that can boot your Mac.

Be sure to try that connected to the USB boot drive that you have. Is that a USB flash drive, with an OS X installer set up to boot? Are you sure it is created correctly? Try it on another Mac to be sure, if possible.

 

[Fishrrman]

Did you initialize the SSD first, and then install a copy of the OS onto it?

Could it be possible that the reason the iMac wouldn't boot was because of something else other than the [old] drive?

 

[tpivette89]

I would do a fresh install... off a bootable USB drive or a DVD you have created. Usually I have to do this when installing a foreign drive into a Mac.