So my wife’s iMac (2008 24″) has the dreaded instant white screen on boot. I cannot get into recovery after trying everything Apple support pages offers (including resetting NVRAM). I would try booting off an older OSX disk, but I only see a mouse cursor and a white screen when attempting to boot off a different drive…
I’m almost certain the HDD has died. I have no issues actually opening the thing up and replacing it, but my problem is booting into recovery since Mavericks was installed.
Does anyone know if the new “internet recovery” is part of the physical HDD that I want to swap out, or is it built into the firmware/CMOS/etc? I’m just wondering if it’s possible to put a blank HDD into a Mac without an OSX disk and it would know what to do… I can’t seem to find the answer to this anywhere, Apple just wants me to bring it in.
