White screen on boot, no disk showing up, no os
I was given this iMac (not entirely sure on the model, but its an older one) and have been attempting to fix it. I am not sure what was wrong with it at the time, but it currently has 5 vertical yellow lines on the start up screen which go away after the apple logo goes away. I have 2 test hard drives which are formatted to HFS+ and are completely blank (the drive was wiped before it was given to me - and i got the other because they suggested it might have not worked).
I finally got OS lion to install on the first hard drive through internet recovery, but then after using it about 10 minutes, the screen turned black with some faint lines going vertically, and when i rebooted, it went to the apple screen, and then went to a white screen and stayed there.
Every time i tried rebooting, it does the same, where it goes to a white screen and stays like that.
I tried using the other hard drive, thinking the other may have failed. Still, the same issue persists. However with this drive, I am able to get internet recovery to start. But once the loading bar is finished, it goes back to the white screen again. The drive does not show up when i hold command r or option. Only internet recovery shows up. I know the drive is not bad. I also have an install of mojave on a flash drive which gives the restricted symbol if i try accessing. Is there a different install I can get for my flash drive that could work?
What can I do to fix it? Is the mac trash? It was free - so not a huge deal. But I would like it to work! Any help would be great. I have tried everything I can find on the internet with no luck. Thanks!
Update (02/23/2019)
I am able to get linux to boot fine using a flash drive. No issues there so far. Still having issues with the hard drive. Maybe this one is bad too.
Update (02/24/2019)
I managed to install ubuntu on the hard drive and used it for a few hours with no issues. Disk check came back ok and wasn’t having any graphical issues. I also fixed the partitions on the hard drive and now OS Lion is installing. Hopefully that works! We will have to see if the same issues happen again once its done.
Update (03/02/2019)
Its been working perfectly for a week now. I believe the issue was with the old hard drive, and that I formatted the new one incorrectly. Thanks!
Is this a good question?
1 Comment
Depending on the graphics drivers Ubuntu installed you maybe only leveraging the CPU's graphics service Vs the dedicated GPU this system has. Which is why it can mislead you into thinking you have a different problem than the GPU board.
by Dan