Chosen Solution
This system is a late 2009 27” iMac. I”m not sure of the exact EMC / CPU. I replaced the drive with Seagate 2TB FireCuda Gaming SSHD SATA 6Gb/s Flash Accelerated (8GB) Performance Hard Drive I purchased the OWC In-line Digital Thermal Sensor from MacSales.com Full disclosure i ruined the display cable removing it from the system. So i purchased this replacement from ebay 593-1281 593-1028 922-9168 LVDS Display Cable For iMac 27" A1312 2009 2010 Put it all together and gave it a hard reset (ctrl opt P R) and it boots to a white screen with a mouse that can be moved. It wont boot to Option R to get to my time machine. But it did recognize my Leopard usb drive that i created from my DVD. But when attempting to boot from it, i get the flashing ?folder icon. Also holding down just Option doesn’t show attached usb hd’s. To me it seems like the system is not recognizing the SSHD. What else can be done to get the system to see the SSHD?
Exact information on your machine is printed on the bottom of the stand. The 2009 does not need the OWC sensor. However it did use three different hard drive temperature sensor cables according to the specific drive. 922-9223 Hitachi 922-9224 Seagate 922-9225 Western Digital Hard drive: Your machine has a Serial ATA (3 Gb/s) bus, so check to see if the drives you are trying are backward compatible to SATA II. Try booting up from your original system installation disk by inserting the disk on boot up and holding down the “C” key. If you can see the drive in Disk Utility format it GUID MacOS Extended. Now you should be able to install a system.
