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Model A1224 / Mid 2007 and Early 2008 / 2, 2.4, or 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo processor

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iMac display colors messed up following hard drive upgrade to SSD

Hey there,

A friend gave me his old iMac (mid 2007), which I love working with except for the terribly slow speed. I bought a new SSD, cloned the original hard drive, followed the tutorials on how to open the machine and replace the drive, but when I turned it back on the screen colors were all messed up in a rainbowy kind of way (otherwise, the SSD seems to function well and fast!). See picture below

I did a PRAM reset - didn’t work. Thought perhaps I had done something wrong and ruined the display , so I disconnected the SSD and put back the old hard drive - the colors were still bad, but after resetting the PRAM - all was good and back to normal. I was relieved, but the speed...

Next, I tried connecting the SSD externally through one of the USB ports (using a proper adapter, which I use to connect another startup SSD to my Macbook pro and it works just fine). After booting from the original drive, the iMac recognizes the SSD, but when I restart and click the Option key to select a different drive to boot from, the SSD is not recognized. Booting with the old drive and then selecting the SSD as the startup disc from System Preferences doesn’t work either.

I thought, maybe I should remove the old drive and leave only the SSD connected externally - the iMac won’t boot.

Bottom line: I know that the display is not damaged, and that the cloned SSD seems to work just fine, except that it messes up the display parameters. I assume this is not a hardware issue with the SSD (otherwise, why would it be working just fine in all other respects??)

Thank you in advance for making the effort to help.

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Hello,

How did you clone your SSD ? The best way is to do a fresh, clean install of macOS on it. To do so, press Cmd and R at the startup, reset your SSD and reinstall macOS. Then at the startup, ask your Mac to clone your old data (it will ask at the first startup - it’s as your Mac is new).

Cheers !

Edit : check Dan’s answer below to learn how to do so on an older Mac.

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@talerant - This is an older Mac that does not have Internet recovery service, so that wont work. As he cloned the drive he likely failed to move over the recovery partition as well depending on the OS-X he installed.

To do a proper OS install you'll need a bootable FireWire or CD/DVD on this series (won't boot with a USB drive).

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Thank you both. Performing a clean install of OS did the job. Dan, the fact that reinstalling the old hdd and booting from it had "fixed" those color patters made me certain that it could not have been a hardware issue. But since the SSD (the clone) seemed to work just fine - except for those annoying patterns - it did not occur to me that a fresh installation of OS would fix this problem. It did, and I am very happy now ;)

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Hi,

Thank you so much for this post. I tried to install a new GPU Nvidia 610M 1GB card that the system did not recognize. I also at the same time changed my SSD from a cloned copy of the original and after putting back togetr got a similar screen. Again I ghouth I messed something up and took apart and back together 2 times to try and fix. I will try the above options again and do a clean install or put the old drive back in and see if this helps.

WIll report back and see if this works for me. fingers crossed

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I’m suspecting your LVDS cable is damaged and/or the connector on the logic board is. You’ll need to open the system up and inspect the cable & the connector.

Take some nice tight & focused pics of the cable end and the connector from the left, right, looking down and looking up so we can see as well posting them here Adding images to an existing question

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