[SOLVED] iMac 2006 5,2 won't boot after hdd replacement, nothing boots

[yago.cascallar]

Hello everyone.
If you have read the thread's title, it may sound familiar as there are a ton of articles or questions about it but I haven't found anything that works. This is the situation:

iMac 5,2 2005. 2Gb RAM, osx Lion, 160Gb HDD.

I decided to upgrade the old hdd and got a 240Gb Kigston uv 400 SSD for it. The drive was formatted with transmac (format for mac option). I swapped the drive and turn it on.
Obviously if i turn it on without any other drive a blank screen the folder/question mark pops up wich seems normal not having any os.

I have a copy os USB-Lion installer that has worked before, but when it tries to boot it stops and reboots. I tried verbose mode for usb booting and while loading kernel cache sonething comes up really quick and reboots. I am assuming it is a kernel panic but it is so fast I can't even take a picture of it. I also tried to load it from a cd as well as a ubuntu (32 bit efi) cd and usb. And it seems it always does the same thing.

So far i have tried:
Reset NVRAM --> it does not do anything
Reset SMC--> Same thing
Boot into safe mode --> Apple logo and question/folder alternate on screen and do nothing.
Boot into recovery mode--> nothing happens.

I have tried every single solution I found on the net, but nothing seems to work for me.
I have also tried to put back the old drive on it and it just doesn't seem to work anymore (although i read somewhere that I should leave it on with the blank screen and just wait for a big while).
Has any of this happened to anyone? Any clues or tips?
Thanks for reading!

 

[yago.cascallar]

SOLVED!
This issue does not seem to be very common but I'll share how i solved it.
Reading through other posts I noticed a case where somebody had a similar issue but in his case it was a 2008 model. To solve that case, the person mentioned that for whatever reason the iMac started again when he decided to boot an installer that had the same OS that the computer had preinstalled when new, and it worked in that case so i tried.
It did now work for me but this lead me to think what where the original specs that the computer was shipped with, in this case being 160GB HDD, 1,83Ghz, OSX Leopard and 512Mb RAM. Since the os along with the HDD were the items to be replaced, and the processor was not to be touched or replace I tried out with RAM. I was trying to run it with 2Gb ram that i had up to that point, so I replaced the module with a 512 one.
And Bingo! That was it, the moment i turned the computer on it worked flawlessly.
So in case it happens to you try it out.
Cheers!