2009 iMac ssd install
Cant get the iMac to see the new ssd. when I boot up disk utility doesn't start up, only the cursor is shown. No disk utility to work with the new ssd. I have tried all combos of command r option shift keys.
While booted to your old drive use Disk Utility to erase the drive. You may need to click on the "View" drop down list above the left pane in Disk Utility and select "Show all devices". Erase the drive as GUID MacOS Extended (Journaled).
You can try checking the Startup Disk System Preferences to see if the Recovery Partition is able to be selected. I'm not sure it is able to be selected on more recent versions of macOS.
If the Recovery Partition cannot be selected, then create a bootable rEFInd USB drive. To do this you need to download the "USB flash drive image file" from this page or by using the direct download link here. Use Etcher to create the USB drive by selecting the "refind-flashdrive-0.11.4.img" file located in the extracted zip file you downloaded as the source image. Option Boot the rEFInd USB drive and select the orange icon labeled "EFI". When you get the rEFInd boot menu, you can press F2 or right-click (or Option click) on the OSX icon to get more boot option such as booting into local Recovery Mode on the external drive. Macs can be very picky about the USB drive used for booting, so if rEFInd isn't shown as a boot option, then try another USB drive.
Another option is to clone the old drive using Carbon Copy Cloner assuming the original drive is physically healthy.
