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gveter

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 6, 2014
3
0
I have a 2007 iMac I’m trying to fix up by replacing the broken hard drive with an SSD and putting a new HD in place of the optical drive via a SATA-to-PATA caddy. Somehow I’ve rendered it unbootable in my multiple case openings. It starts up and shows rEFInd, which I installed while pursuing what turned out to be a dead end. It’s unresponsive to keyboard input, so I can’t start up in verbose mode. (I did make sure the keyboard works on another computer.) Once rEFInd chooses to boot of the SSD by default, the computer just hangs at the Apple logo.

I’m pretty sad because the computer was working, booting up off the new internal SSD, I just wasn’t able to format the hard drive in the SATA-to-PATA caddy due to the dreaded “unable to write to last block of device” error from Disk Utility. I could have just left it alone and used an external drive, but I kept experimenting, thinking that maybe a 2TB drive was too big for the caddy once I saw that this caddy says “you can install up to a 1 TB hard drive”, but a 1TB drive didn’t work either. Restoring it to the original HD and SuperDrive hasn’t worked, so I’ve broken something somewhere.


Can anyone think of how I might determine what’s wrong? Is there some kind of log file I can read by connecting the iMac’s drive to another computer that might show where startup is failing? Or a way to determine why it’s not registering keyboard input? Or can I somehow create a custom OS X installation that will boot into verbose mode by default?
 
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