Imac won't boot

Caporegime
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
33,467
Location
West Yorks
So I first tried the obvious thing and reset the nvram / pram which didn't help.

It displays the grey screen, with an aple logo, and a spinning gear. The apple logo then turns into a circle with a line through it, like a no entry sign.

Pressing cmd and r to boot into recovery mode does nothing, it just carries on with the normal boot process, which then fails. Same with pressing shift and trying to get into safe mode.

The only other thing that's worked is pressing shift on startup. This gives me both the option for macintosh HD as well as the option for the recovery HD. However if I choose the option for the recovery HD. I just get stuck at an apple logo with a spinning wheel and no disk activity.

Short of going to the apple store has anybody any better ideas ? :( must have heard me talking about replacing it with a new one next week
 
Its 5 years old so well out of warranty.

Its only gone and failed because it heard me talking about buying a new one this friday lol.

I may have to invest in a £2 suction lifter from ebay and give it a whirl. Its a late 2009 27" so has the glass front panel held in place by strong magents.
 
Prohibitory sign basically translates as boot failure. It's either a corrupt install or more likely a failing/failed hard drive.

If you've got access to another Mac with Firewire you can connect them up and run disk utility via Target Disk mode. You can also use that to "borrow" the optical drive and re-install OS X.

Alternatively, if you have another Mac (or friend's Mac) make a recovery USB drive. Link to info: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4848

You boot onto that using Alt and triage the disk from the disk utility, potentially reinstall the OS.

You could even go the step further and Mac a bootable Lion/ML/Mavericks installer to the same effect.

Don't have another mac unfortunately :(
 
Last edited:
Nope.

Gonna get one of the guys at work to make me a USB recovery drive. There are a few mac users in the business so just need to butter one of them up.
 
I'm going to have to take you up on your offer. Turns out the recovery mode doesn't work when created on new macs and ran an old one that was pre lion.

I'll PayPal you the postage if you can trust me your details.
 
Replied :) I think royal mail are open Saturday so I'll post it then :)

Drive came today so thanks for that :)

Unfortunately appears not to have helped. The thing insists on trying to boot to the hard drive thats knackered.

It won't boot into recovery mode when i do command + r
it won't boot into safe mode when I hold shift
It won't boot into a recovery mode usb stick
It won't boot off the DVD drive when i hold C
It won't boot into the hardwware test when i hold D

none of the above produce errors, the machine just ignores the input and carries on as if I hadn't pressed anything.

I had put this down to the keyboard having unpaired itself, , so got an old USB windows keyboard. Boot up by holding C to get it to boot of the DVD and it just hangs. No circle with a line through it, just plain hangs, and the keyboard stops working and it just sits there.

This thing is ****ed. Booked it into apple store on sunday to be looked at. Its ridiculous how much of a tantrum this thing is throwing. I could understand the drive failing as its a 5 year old mac. But my problems run far greater than just a failed drive as it won't boot from any other media.
 
So took it into apple store today and the drive is definitely knackered. It wouldn't boot into any of their diagnostics software either and when trying to force an OS repair through terminal just gave I/O errors.

However the apple store have agreed to replace the drive free of charge for me after I told them about having taken it in once already to have the graphics card replaced and the PSU on my time capsule going.

Amazing service from the apple store as usual
 
Back
Top Bottom