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My imac hard drive failed and i had to replace it. Once i replaced it the imac booted up fine and i started an install and it said installation could not be verified so i got a different copy of osx 10.9 but when i booted up the imac it would not read the hard drive. I thought the drive went bad but when i removed it and tested it on another system it worked just fine so i reinstalled it but nothing . Screen just showed a folder with question mark flashing and when i tried to install an os it started to mount and when installing i got a circle with a slash through it.
How about checking your systems firmware levels to make sure they are up to date. Follow this Apple TN: About EFI and SMC firmware updates for Intel-based Mac computers. Make sure you are at least at the levels listed or newer. The Seagate Barracuda drive you got is a SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) drive so you are using the correct drive for your system. Jump to section 3.2 in the drive manual for more info.
Did you format the drive first? Format it GUID, give it one partition? Format it Mac OS-X Extended? Did you do a full system installation?
