Chosen Solution
My church had an older iMac that wasn’t working. They took it to the Apple store and were told that the hard drive needed replacing and the cost to do it was more than the computer was worth. They were going to recycle it, so they gave it to me. I ordered a new SSD drive and a mounting kit. I took the SSD drive and cloned the complete OS onto it from my 2011 MacBook Pro and used a USB dock to test. I was able to successfully boot to the SSD drive. I followed these directions and installed the drive. Everything went smoothly until I tried to boot. I get a blinking question mark. The computer does not recognize the drive inside it. I went through the recovery options and it just isn’t showing up. I know the drive works. Is there a chance that the SATA cables are bad? What else could it be?
First Apple is full of it. This is a good machine. We do have some issues (created by Apple to prevent you from upgrading this machine). Specifically the proprietary heat sensor on the hard drive. Due to the new repair partition created when a new system is installed, cloning is no longer recommended. The highest system this machine will take is High Sierra. The problem is that it tries to install APFS formatting, where as Sierra does not. In short, you need to first format the drive. GUID if 10.12 or lower, APFS if 10.13. Now install the system and then use migration Assistant to move your data into it. You may need this to prevent run away fan. OWC In-line Digital Thermal Sensor for iMac 2011 Hard Drive Upgrade https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/DIDI… It’s also cheap to double the RAM because of the four slots.
