2009 27" iMac - replaced hard drive - won't boot past white screen
2009 27" iMac hard drive quite a month ago. Wouldn't boot. Would try, had the "loading bar" going across the screen, but eventually would show a question mark if I remember correctly. Anyway, chatted with Apple Support online, and they tried a few things and said to bring it in to a store. We brought it into their store, and they hooked it into their system and said the hard drive was bad. They wouldn't work on it since it was so old, but told us to just replace the hard drive.
We replaced the hard drive last night with no issues. Installed a Seagate Baracuda, 1TB, ST1000DM010. Pretty sure the install went great, and no issues.
After installing the new hard drive, I tried to boot with the OS DVD in the drive, holding down option, and just get the chime and a blank white screen. Tried holding down c, and same thing.
Thought the optical drive might be bad, so created a boot USB drive with Mac Os Sierra (will this work with a 2009 iMac?). Tried to boot from the USB drive by holding option, and still get a blank white screen.
Looked around at different solutions. Tried pressing the power button without holding, but that just shut it off. Tried resetting the PRAM? (Option, CTRL, P R) for one cycle. It did restart the computer, but still blank white screen.
Any thoughts or suggestions? Should I try booting in Target Mode and check the new hard drive? It still doesn't make sense to me why it won't show me boot options.
Is this a good question?