I screwed up. I need help.
I recently and successfully dropped Raspbian desktop onto my MacBook Pro. It is a 17" Santa Rosa (A1229).
I came back after and tried to switch it to iRaspbian, not realizing that this was not compatible (but I tried). The firmware got screwed up somehow during the install and the machine no longersees the internal hard drive.
I can boot into the Raspbian installer from a thumb drive, boot from any Mac Install DVD, and boot from any number of my external drives which contain CarboCopyClones of other systems. In all cases, once in, the internal drive is not seen from any resource. I have dropped different drives with good systems, including the original drive for this machine. Nothing works when installed internally.
Shortcut commands such as PRAM reset, SMC reset, and others do not resolve the issue. Because Raspibian changed to firmware to some extent, Cmd/Opt/Shft/R nor any other remote restore option works. After a lot of gymnastics with Apple firmware installers and the Blank Board Serializer I finally got nowhere. Every boot up takes me to the flashing "?" unless I have one of the aforementioned external devices or a Mac DVD in.
I want my end state to be Raspbian desktop or my original Mac OS. In either case, I need to be able to see the internal hard drive.
Again, there are (triple confirmed) no hardware issues or drive issues and I have even tried with the original drive from this machine. This went wrong when I jumped from a working Raspbian install (which altered the boot rom) to iRaspbian, which further impacted the firmware and messed things up.
with only the debian USB flash booted, have you tried zeroing the /dev/sdasudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda
it will take a dogs age, but if the hardware can be read then it might work.