Ok so the title is a little vague. Let me give some more background.
My 2011 27'' iMac's hard drive was crapping out, so I replaced it, but it was still a little slow so I opted to get a Seagate SSHD. Upon attempting to install the SSHD I managed to do what appears to have been cracking of the monitor's power cable (ribbon) where it plugs into the logic board, whoops. So the display wouldn't work at all when booting up. I tried my best to fix this, pushing pins where I could see them back into place etc but to no avail.
I went out and bought a 24'' Acer monitor and tried to hook up an external display via VGA to MiniDisplay port (into the thunderbolt port). All I saw was either the flat grey screen or the flat grey patch screen. I was able to see my mouse however and it disappeared off to the left of the screen. Upon further reading online, I discovered that I was perhaps in 'extended desktop mode' and simply couldn't see the login screen. I have no idea how to fix this because I can't adjust settings since I'm at the login screen.
I tried tinkering with the cables some more to see if I could get the display to work and upon doing so, I neglected to insert screws into the screen so it fell forward and literally ripped the vertical sync cable out of it's fitting, bent the pins on the other cable that connects the LCD to the logic board and the ribbon cable.
I thought I was screwed (no pun intended) so I figured I would bring the damaged LCD iMac to another iMac and try target display mode on a working one.
Same thing happened where I only saw the extended desktop on the working iMac's screen or what I think is.
Interestingly enough, I hit command F1 (or F2, can't remember) on the damaged iMac and the screen mirrored the good one! So I guess that means the LCD does work, but for some reason its not working when I try to boot up the computer on it's own. Anyone have any ideas as to why that is?
The second question I guess is how the heck do get this thing out of extended mode if I can't access the settings on the damaged computer to do so?
I also tried booting into disk utility via the time machine (holding down option) in an effort to restore the last back up to the brand new BLANK drive I put in, but couldn't because again, only saw a blank grey screen.
So, I put the original (working) drive back in that has OSX on it hoping that I could figure out how to put everything "back to normal"
Now I don't know if the hard drive is damaged or if this is a display issue or what...
I'm in a real pickle...
My 2011 27'' iMac's hard drive was crapping out, so I replaced it, but it was still a little slow so I opted to get a Seagate SSHD. Upon attempting to install the SSHD I managed to do what appears to have been cracking of the monitor's power cable (ribbon) where it plugs into the logic board, whoops. So the display wouldn't work at all when booting up. I tried my best to fix this, pushing pins where I could see them back into place etc but to no avail.
I went out and bought a 24'' Acer monitor and tried to hook up an external display via VGA to MiniDisplay port (into the thunderbolt port). All I saw was either the flat grey screen or the flat grey patch screen. I was able to see my mouse however and it disappeared off to the left of the screen. Upon further reading online, I discovered that I was perhaps in 'extended desktop mode' and simply couldn't see the login screen. I have no idea how to fix this because I can't adjust settings since I'm at the login screen.
I tried tinkering with the cables some more to see if I could get the display to work and upon doing so, I neglected to insert screws into the screen so it fell forward and literally ripped the vertical sync cable out of it's fitting, bent the pins on the other cable that connects the LCD to the logic board and the ribbon cable.
I thought I was screwed (no pun intended) so I figured I would bring the damaged LCD iMac to another iMac and try target display mode on a working one.
Same thing happened where I only saw the extended desktop on the working iMac's screen or what I think is.
Interestingly enough, I hit command F1 (or F2, can't remember) on the damaged iMac and the screen mirrored the good one! So I guess that means the LCD does work, but for some reason its not working when I try to boot up the computer on it's own. Anyone have any ideas as to why that is?
The second question I guess is how the heck do get this thing out of extended mode if I can't access the settings on the damaged computer to do so?
I also tried booting into disk utility via the time machine (holding down option) in an effort to restore the last back up to the brand new BLANK drive I put in, but couldn't because again, only saw a blank grey screen.
So, I put the original (working) drive back in that has OSX on it hoping that I could figure out how to put everything "back to normal"
Now I don't know if the hard drive is damaged or if this is a display issue or what...
I'm in a real pickle...
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