Chosen Solution
I’ve tried absolutely everything to find my boot drive and cannot do anything. Mac won’t boot and in disk utility in recovery only the cd drive and some hard disk with very little space shows up. Tried accessing files with the terminal and still nothing.
If your system is able to boot up from recovery partition (not internet recovery) it sounds like the primary partition was deleted and you just need to format it and install the OS. If your system is booting up from either from an external drive or Internet Recovery (from the network) then your drive has died and will need to replace it iMac Intel 21.5" EMC 2428 Hard Drive Replacement
