Chosen Solution
After replacing the hdd in my iMac and booting it back on there was a white screen with a folder indicating that there was no hdd. I opened her back up checked connections and then followed them as far as I could. I ended up taking out the logic board to see that all cables were connected and working. I’m not sure what to do now at this point. I have a wired mouse but no keyboard connected to this computer. I have a wireless keyboard but it’s paired with another iMac while putting this one back together.
Lets put your computer back together so you are back with the white screen with the question mark. Once you get to that point we are very close in getting things working. OK, now we need a bootable drive to finish the install. Is the HD you took out working? If so we could use it. In this case you’ll need a SATA to USB adapter cable like this one: USB 2.0 to SATA/IDE Combo Adapter. Using it we can boot up your system to finish the process. If you don’t have a working drive you’ll need to create one. Using a friends Mac and a USB flash drive you can use the OS installer to install a bootable OS onto the flash drive. Then copy over the OS installer to it and using it on your mac you should be able to boot up your system and then using the OS installer thats on it install the OS onto your new HD. Update Sadly I have some bad news here ;-{ Your systems SATA port is only SATA II (3.0 Gb/s). The drive you got a Western Digital Caviar Blue 1 TB is a fixed SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) drive. For your reference click on the link above for your system and here’s the drives spec sheet: WD Blue Desktop Hard Drives. This drive won’t work in your system as the SATA I/O speed is too fast. You also have a second problem here: This series uses a special cable to access the internal thermal sensor within the HD. You need to use the same vendor of HD as the replacement (Seagate for a Seagate, etc…). So depending on what your system came with you’ll need to match up the SAME vendor as the cable is different from vendor to vendor Apple used. As it turns out you can replace the cable! So if you want to change the drive out to a different vendor you can, its a bit more work and you’ll need to order it matching it up to your SATA II drive you are getting. Cable, Temp Sensor, Hard Drive 922-9223 - Hitachi Drive 922-9224 - Seagate Drive 922-9225 - Western Digital Drive OK, So far we’ve gone over why your drive won’t work and why your fan’s go into high gear. Lets see if we can find a better drive for you. Again, you do need to match up the vendor unless you swap out the cable. So lets say you had a Seagate drive then I would go with a Seagate SSHD drive. Here’s a description of the drive: Seagate Desktop SSHD, and here is the spec sheet for it: Seagate Desktop SSHD spec sheet. Whats important here is checking out this line: “SATA Transfer Rates Supported (Gb/s)” note it offers SATA III, II & I support “6.0/3.0/1.5” so its a perfect fit for you and you’ll get the zip of a SSD and yet the deep storage of a traditional HD.
