Chosen Solution
My 2005 24” iMac doesn’t boot anymore, I get a white screen with a question mark folder. All of the onboard diagnostic LED’s are Green & Apple Hardware Test (AHT) shows that everything is OK. In hardware profile it says Graphics: “Unknown video”. Could it be that is something wrong with the graphic card?
Update (02/21/2019) This is the message I get.
@george72 - You’ll need to find an older SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) drive or get a drive which will run at SATA II. Most drives today are SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) unless it can auto sense the systems SATA speed it won’t work! Here’s a few choices: Barracuda Compute 3.5” seriesFireCuda 3.5” seriesSamsung 2.5” 860 EVO SSD You’ll need an adapter frame to hold it in your system. If the spec sheet doesn’t list SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) it likely won’t work. The drives I’ve listed here work!
No. A screen with a blinking folder/question mark indicates a hard drive issue. Typically this is just a hard drive failure, and that’s what I would assume based on your system’s age, but you could always give First Aid in Disk Utility a shot. Apple has an entire post on troubleshooting steps you can read through, but basically you should just boot to recovery by holding the Option key on boot, and selecting the recovery partition. If you can’t see the recovery partition you’ll probably need to insert your installation disk and boot from that instead. Once you’re in Disk Utility you can use the First Aid utility on your system drive to try and recover from any errors. If Disk Utility can’t see your disk at all, or First Aid fails, you’ll pretty much have to replace the drive.
