Startup Problem

Click here and follow the instructions. If the computer was running Mac OS X 10.6.8 or earlier and you reach the third set of steps, insert a Mac OS X install disk.

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If the operating system that was in it was above 10.6 snow leopard ,you can boot holding down the Command/R or Option R keys to go to recovery. If it was running snow leopard or earlier you need the install disk. You cannot boot to yosemite if the operating system is not at least snow leopard. Even off a usb stick. You can check the drive if you have a bootable install disk. Or you can try single user to check the drive.http://www.westwind.com/reference/os-x/commandline/single-user.html You may have a bad drive.

The computer probably has some kind of hardware problem, so a bootable second system

may only be good (if you can make one) for troubleshooting & test purposes. If you had an

externally enclosed hard disk drive with its own power supply capable of booting OS X from

a clone, then you'd be more than halfway to testing the actual computer hardware issues...

A bad cable, or some other component (including hard disk drive) may have failed. If so, the

symptoms indicate further diagnostic troubleshooting, testing, & component replacements.

See if this method to make a bootable install device for newest OS X versions, may work:

http://diskmakerx.com/ could be helpful, or if nothing else, a learning experience.

Good luck & happy computing! 🙂

It would appear that you have no operating system installed or at lest not a usable one. Or the hard drive or hard drive cable is bad. You do not say what year macbook you have.Some early macbooks will not run yosemite. In order to test the drive you need a bootable O.S. so you can use the disk utilities to check the drive. If you do not know the year, you can look on the bottom or under the battery for the serial number. Then it can be looked up on line. I tried transmac to make a bootable yosemite usb stick and it did not work. Had to do it using terminal. If what you have is a macbook 2010 or older,you will need the snow leopard install disk from apple to boot to.http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC573Z/A/mac-os-x-106-snow-leopard?afid=p238%7 CsBaB8fHLm-dc_mtid_1870765e38482_pcrid_71178685807_&cid=aos-us-kwg-btb https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201475

I will add to my other post that if there was anything to boot to. And it had a newer operating system installed. Newer then 10.6 . You could get to a recovery partition by the option key or Command R. Since you cannot. Using a yosemite boot dvd or usb stick will not work. To boot to a yosemite usb or dvd you have to have 10.6 snow leopard or later installed or at least a newer than snow leopard recovery partition.