Help!! iMac Won’t Boot!

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
3,771
Location
Livingston
My late 2013 iMac has decided to stop working on me. I restarted after noticing some sluggish performance and now it will not boot back in to macOS at all.

Specs
Late 2013
27”
3.5Ghz i7
32GB RAM
1TB Fusion Drive
4GB GeForce GTX780M

I get the normal boot chime and Apple logo with boot status bar but it’s going incredibly slowly. If I leave it for awhile the boot status bar does eventually go white but macOS doesn’t load. On one occasion it the status bar did load but all I got was a black screen and a beach ball.

I’ve tried:
  • Booting into Safe Mode
  • Booting into Recovery Mode
  • Booting into Internet Recovery Mode
  • Resetting SMC & PRAM
All unsuccessfully

I’ve also tried booting in Verbose and Single User Mode. When booted in Verbose the screen was moving quickly with text, so couldn’t get a photo on my iPhone but it was reporting corruption to files :(

This is a photo from Single User Mode boot, again mentioning corruption to files.

DMIt1a8.jpg

Everything I’ve tried so far has been unsuccessful to get it to successfully boot.

Anyone have any ideas?
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
3,771
Location
Livingston
Probably a knackered disk. Can you boot into single user and access command line?

Thanks for the quick reply. That’s what I was thinking as well :(

Yes, I can access command line in single user. It’s sitting at local host root# etc, so I’m assuming that’s root access.
 
Commissario
Joined
16 Oct 2002
Posts
2,646
Location
In the radio shack
Looks like your drive is shagged.
Get an external SSD, boot into recovery mode, install a fresh copy of the OS onto the external SSD, boot from that and restore your backup.
Job done.

And it'll be a lot quicker.
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
3,771
Location
Livingston
Looks like your drive is shagged.
Get an external SSD, boot into recovery mode, install a fresh copy of the OS onto the external SSD, boot from that and restore your backup.
Job done.

And it'll be a lot quicker.

Thanks for the advice Feek. May well need to go down in the short term.

Would there be anything stopping me replacing the mechanical drive with an internal SSD and fusing that with the existing onboard 128GB flash, creating a single SSD fusion drive?
 
Commissario
Joined
16 Oct 2002
Posts
2,646
Location
In the radio shack
Not in theory, no but is there any real point in re-using the old SSD as it's another point of failure. If you meld that into a new Fusion drive then if it fails, you're back to square one. It's a desktop machine, I think I'd be happy running an external drive.
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
3,771
Location
Livingston
The next problem I have is the ability to do the repair. There was a time that I could do this myself, and used to! I’m a wheelchair user (tetraplegic through a spinal cord injury) so I have very limited hand function.....there is no chance I can do this myself now :(

Obviously with the age of the machine any Apple Care has long expired. The machine is perfectly serviceable, runs Catalina great! I would only consider replacing it when Apple finally delivers a much needed redesign.

Does anyone know of or even better recommend a company that could carry out the repair/upgrade?
 
Soldato
Joined
25 Jun 2006
Posts
4,312
What version OS are you on? If High Sierra (10.13) or lower, get yourself a copy of Disk Warrior and run that. It wont work on Mojave and above as it cant rebuild the AFS file structure these newer versions use.
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
3,771
Location
Livingston
What version OS are you on? If High Sierra (10.13) or lower, get yourself a copy of Disk Warrior and run that. It wont work on Mojave and above as it cant rebuild the AFS file structure these newer versions use.

Thanks for the idea but I was running the latest build of Catalina when the disk failed.

I’m just back from a trip to Glasgow to drop of my iMac with a well reviewed independent Apple repair company.

They are going to remove the fusion drive (both the mechanical drive and the existing 128GB PCI-E SSD) and replace it with a 1TB SSD.

All being well I should get it back at the end of the week.
 
Back
Top Bottom