- #MAC NEW HARD DRIVE QUESTION MARK FOLDER MAC OS X#
- #MAC NEW HARD DRIVE QUESTION MARK FOLDER INSTALL#
- #MAC NEW HARD DRIVE QUESTION MARK FOLDER PRO#
If all else fails, you may have to take it to an Apple Store or repair facility.
#MAC NEW HARD DRIVE QUESTION MARK FOLDER MAC OS X#
If you have an external USB hard drive with a bootable copy of Mac OS X on it (e.g., a backup that you created with a cloning program), you might try booting from it. Another way to recover is by reinstalling Mac OS X from the Internet, but as you found out, that only works if you can make a network connection. That only works if whatever trashed your boot volume didn't also trash the recovery partition. One way to recover is to use the recovery partition. This doesn't necessarily mean that the hardware is broken it may just be that the contents of the interna drive got corrupted or erased. PowerBookMedic carries one that appears to be a normal SATA cable it might be reasonable to get a new regular SATA cable of appropriate length and try that.A flashing folder with a question mark, at startup time, means that the machine cannot find a valid boot volume. IFixit doesn't carry a specific SATA cable for a 2010 iMac. This is a stunt that's probably not worth worrying about unless the drive doesn't work with the cable you already have but just in case. I got a replacement from iFixit, and it worked perfectly.
#MAC NEW HARD DRIVE QUESTION MARK FOLDER PRO#
I had this experience with a 2010 MacBook Pro last week the recommendation from OtherWorld Computing was to replace the old hard drive cable with a brand new one. There was a window of several years (roughly 2008-2011) when the hard drive cables were good enough to carry data at platter drive speeds, but got finicky when you ran data off the much faster SSDs.
Getting a drive into an aluminum iMac is a big job I'd want to make absolutely sure the new drive was ready to go before doing all that work.ģ) is an issue specific to the installation of new SSDs in older Macs.
#MAC NEW HARD DRIVE QUESTION MARK FOLDER INSTALL#
One way to approach this issue is to format the SSD externally and install an OS on it before installing it inside the computer. If you leave the old external drive attached when the iMac restarts into the new OS, you'll get an opportunity to transfer all your user accounts and applications from your old system. If you have the old hard drive you pulled out when you swapped the SSD in, you can attach that drive to the computer with a USB or FireWire adapter/case, boot from that, then format the SSD, download the OS installer and run it on the internal drive. The installer has a copy of Disk Utility, which you can use to format the internal SSD you can then run the installer and you'll get a plain-vanilla El Capitan system. If you have access to another working Mac, you can download an OS X 10.11.3/El Capitan installer from the App Store and then clone the installer to a thumb drive. In order to set up the new drive, you have to boot from something else to get access to the formatting tool (Disk Utility) and an OS installer. The flashing ? is the sign that the iMac can't find a bootable OS if you attach a bootable drive, the iMac will grab onto it and boot from that drive. Did you replace the existing hard drive cable with a shiny new cable?ġ) and 2) If you've installed a brand new, unformatted drive without attaching a drive with a bootable operating system, then the computer has no drive to boot from at all.
Do you have some bootable drive (either the internal optical drive or an external) with an appropriate OSX installer ready?.Did you format the SSD as an HFS+ drive with GUID partition table before you installed it?.
This should be pretty straightforward, but a couple of questions first: