iMac A1312 OS not booting. A Folder Icon displayed as shown

[alltvrepairs]

Hi,

I have 0 experience in iMac so would like your assistance starting diagnosing this one.

When switched on I can hear the Apple chime and display stays white. After a few minutes a folder icon with a question mark starts blinking on and off.

Any help much appreciated. I have found a youtube for disassembly procedure.

[mon2]

This means there is no bootable media for the mac operating system. You may be missing a hard drive / missing a ssd or the drive is blank / formatted. You will have to open up the unit to investigate if the drive is present or not. This model should be held together with magnets so you will need large suction cups (2 are ok) to remove the front face glass. Check YT videos on the process to investigate. You can also consider to boot from a USB media to load up an operating system.

[stormanimal83]

This means there is no bootable media for the mac operating system. You may be missing a hard drive / missing a ssd or the drive is blank / formatted. You will have to open up the unit to investigate if the drive is present or not. This model should be held together with magnets so you will need large suction cups (2 are ok) to remove the front face glass. Check YT videos on the process to investigate. You can also consider to boot from a USB media to load up an operating system.

very good advice... the latest os u can use on this machine ist High Sierra macOS 10.13.x . this mac has got a disk drive... look for a bootable media an try to reinstall. due installation u will be noticed if there is noch hdd inside...

[alltvrepairs]

This means there is no bootable media for the mac operating system. You may be missing a hard drive / missing a ssd or the drive is blank / formatted. You will have to open up the unit to investigate if the drive is present or not. This model should be held together with magnets so you will need large suction cups (2 are ok) to remove the front face glass. Check YT videos on the process to investigate. You can also consider to boot from a USB media to load up an operating system.

Hi
tks for the advice.

I have replaced with a formatted exFat32 1Tb blank drive as the original drive has too many bad sectors. Upon switched on same happened. The I have swithce on and press ALT key (on microsoft keybpard) and press ON and got a screen to enter Paswword which we do not know.
Now I am trying to clone the bad HDD maybe the boot sector is ok and try when clone finisihed probably by tomorrow.

Should I download an OS to a USB and boot on it?

[monitron]

Have you tried restarting with cmd - opt - R for online recovery?

[alltvrepairs]

Have you tried restarting with cmd - opt - R for online recovery?

Tried with ALT-WINDOWS-P-R as found for win keyboard..

[mon2]

https://medium.com/@shrey3432/breaki...d-b15820db0d9d

[alltvrepairs]

Update:

The iMac has been fixed. The original fault was a bad hard disk 1TB. I have replaced with a new one formatted it to ExFat32 but on switching ON required Bios Password which I did not have. I have made a Read/Write test on the old drive and had too many bad blocks hence the failure.
I have CLONED the old drive (source) to the new drive (target) which clones partitions and bootable sector, put in place the new drive and iMac switched on fine!

Tks for the help in this forum. Really appreciated. Note: do not wipe/format the old drive until the new one has been resolved!!

[monitron]

Good job!