21.5 inch iMac mid-2011

It stays with the logo and the full progress bar. I left it like that all night once and nothing happened. Here is the picture of what it looks like after I select the bootable usb.

(I’m not sure why the picture is upside down on my Screen)

it freezes for about 5 minutes here, then goes to the logo and progress bar.

So for the about 3 hours it’s been saying “Loading disks” with the loading circle above it. I exited disk utility after the first 5 minutes and went to reinstall macOS. I got to the screen where it tells me to select a disk to install it one and only the usb, which is locked, showed up. Not my HDD(Macintosh HD) nor my Recovery partition. I went back to disk utility and it’s been loading ever since.

Ok. I created a bootable installer on my usb stick using Apple’s online instructions. I selected it on the disk selector and connected to my wifi(it won’t let me connect to Ethernet?). After a while, the Apple logo shows up and it starts loading slowly, but freezes at the end. I might be doing something wrong trying to boot into it. Is there a certain way to do it?

Ok update. I just retried to boot into the usb. It worked! It asked me to select my language and brought me to the recovery screen. I chose disk utility to see if I could repair the disk and save some stuff.

Ok I installed the new HDD and it’s working like a charm :) thanks

thanks I ordered one two days ago. I’ll install it and see if that’s the problem. :)