Grey or White screen with flashing folder with question mark

Lanacas wrote:

This is a macbook pro 2010 17" screen. Well I put a hard drive in that has windows on it. Press the option. It see the windows hard drive. So anyway I try other commands to see if can just install mac os on to the hard drive. None of the commands will work. Keep holding them down and get that same flashing folder with question mark on it. Screen is always grey or white. Try external keyboards. Nothing seems to get to a screen to install mac os. The original hard drive dead in it. The owner never back up the macbook. I looked up the problem and seem like every site say the same thing.

If your Mac starts up to a question mark

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204323

Did you replace the drive?

Did you format the new drive?

You can reinstall a macOS on a formatted drive from Recovery—

How to reinstall macOS from macOS Recovery - https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204904

How to erase/format/initialize your Intel-based Mac - https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208496