0

I have an old iMac (2009) and I've been digging through to make sure there's nothing we want to keep before wiping it to sell. Once upon a time it had dual boot through Bootcamp. I was looking at the partitions in recovery mode and noticed that it still had the bootcamp partition. If I recall correctly, I managed to set it so it would boot to that partition (I was curious to check that there was nothing we wanted to keep)

After restarting, it makes the start up chime on a light grey screen, doesn't show any logos, then goes to a black screen with a blinking cursor. I can't get it to boot into recovery now using the usual means.

How can I get it to boot correctly again? I've done nothing else to it, so the OS should still be there.

Improve this question
3
  • Nothing with Opt key or Cmd/R?
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Jan 18, 2021 at 9:52
  • @Tetsujin nothing at all. The only possible issue there is I dont have a wired mac keyboard so I'm using a PC keyboard, but it's never been a problem in the past... I got into recovery with it in the first place...
    – Bamboo
    Commented Jan 18, 2021 at 23:33
  • I'm not sure what to suggest other than try a wired Apple keyboard. The black screen with flashing cursor suggests it's trying to boot to Windows but can't find the OS for some reason. If that's set as default (& especially if the macOS was running on APFS rather than HFS, then Windows can't see the Mac drive to hand over the boot blessing, so the Opt key is about the only way - short of trying to persuade it to boot from a USB etc…
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Jan 19, 2021 at 8:56

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
1

It was the keyboard. For some reason using a PC keyboard wouldn't bring up the boot options when pressing the equivalent of the option key.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .