A friend of mine who is a Pc repair guy with not much Mac experience replaced my dead HD in an early 08 iMac with a Samsung Evo 860 SSD. We did not format the disc. When I try to boot from old install discs I just get the folder with ? mark. I tried to boot from a bootable drive I made by partitioning out part of an external HD but all when I turn on and hit command R with the bootable drive, I get the apple logo for about 10 minutes and then it restarts itself. Am I doomed since we didn't format the drive or is there a way to do it after it's been installed. I have zero skill when it comes to this stuff and am hoping not to have to ask my friend to take it all apart again. Thanks, everybody.
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2008 iMac with unformatted Evo 860
- Thread starter dogbird
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So, in order to install macOS on your Evo 860 you would've had to reformat it to HFS+ or APFS. Otherwise there is no boot volume, and that is why you can't boot.
What version of MacOS did you put on the external drive? If it's Sierra or High Sierra it won't boot on your old 2008 iMac. Download OS X El Capitan, erase the partition you made on the external drive, and follow these instructions to create a bootable installer.
Go to ifixit and check out their not using Samsung SDD on pre 2010 iMacs written by Dan. Purely a SATA speed backwards compatibility problem. Posted here half a dozen times
Thanks, I created a bootable Mountain lion drive however it's a Partioned section in big hard Drive. The hard drive has another partition that has lots of data on it and a separate partition with just the bootable drive. Does the bootable drive need to be an isolated USB? Could that be the problem?