iMac not booting

spudbynight · 12 Oct 2012 at 20:21

I am having some issues with my iMac for the last couple of hours. Hopefully someone can help.

I am running Mountain Lion on a 2011 iMac. I also use Bootcamp. I was just about to switch to Windows to play some XCom and the system wouldn't get past the grey startup screen. (Before the Apple logo)

I can't boot into either OSX or Windows. Both just hang. I can get into the recovery mode. I have repaired permissions and repaired the disk. That didn't make any difference.

I have time machine backups and for some reason the iMac doesn't see them. When I try to restore from timemachine I get a dialog screen saying it is searching for backups and that just hangs.

Captain Chaos · 12 Oct 2012 at 20:27

sounds like a hdd issue.

Have you tried booting from an external hdd?

If you have a 2011 imac you should be able to install the os onto an external drive from the boot up menu

spudbynight · 12 Oct 2012 at 20:40

Well, there seems to be an issue with the external drive. I have tried verifying that and it came up with an error message about an EFI table that might affect booting. I tried to fix it and it wouldn't allow me to. I tried unplugging the HDD from the Mac and rebooting and no joy.

I have gone into the disk manager and am no trying to repair the mounted volume rather than the drive. It says 20mins to do this. I will report back when it is done.

Captain Chaos · 12 Oct 2012 at 20:46

could always try a different external if you have one available.

That said to have a broken internal and external occur at the same time is highly unlikely.

That is presuming that your external was in use and not faulty already of course

Possibly a logic board fault but it deffo sounds like a hdd fault to me.

Roughneck · 13 Oct 2012 at 21:03

I had a similar issue , it turns out my Time machine drive had a corrupt backup for some reason preventing machine booting up, once unplugged the external drive it booted fine.

Roughneck · 13 Oct 2012 at 21:04

Have you tried resetting the Pram as well?

spudbynight · 14 Oct 2012 at 10:43

OK - I managed to get up and running again. I had my Android phone plugged in over USB and for some reason that was causing the iMac to fail to boot.

For some reason after I removed it and rebooted everything was OK. Even the EFI related errors on the external HDD were gone.