Resolved 2011 iMac froze, i held power button down, now it wont reboot

[peeaanuut]

So my iMac just froze. Was trying to copy to a network drive and it locked up. I let it sit thinking it just might be behind but it stayed that way for a bit. So I held the power button down and it powered down. I unplugged all external peripherals including the network cable and attempted to reboot.

Now it wont get passed the apple logo and spinning thing below it. I dont have an external Lion boot disk as it didnt come with one. I do have a snow leopard disk but I didnt want to try it until I confirmed it will be ok to try to at least get it to go with that.

Any thoughts? I have tried to boot into safe mode with the shift key, I did get a progress bar when I did that and it got to the end of the progress bar and did nothing, so I let the key go and there it stayed. I also did the CMD Shft P R reset and got the dbl chime but no luck with that either.

Hopefully the geniouses here can help me out. Thoughts? Ideas? Rants? Insults?

 

[simsaladimbamba]

What about pressing the OPTION key to boot into the recovery partition?
You can also use the SL DVD to troubleshoot the problem, you will not create any incompatibilities doing so, unless you erase the HDD or something drastic like that.

 

[peeaanuut]

Oh hey!! I was able to get the list. I was able to get into the recovery partition but I got a little scured. If I reinstall Lion, am I gonna have to go through all the chaos that I would when reinstalling windows?

I guess Im asking, is it a factory restore or is it just an OS reinstall and my files will be good? I am guessing its the latter, but its worth it to ask.

 

[peeaanuut]

the reinstall has worked. Now its time to set up the time machine that I didnt do before like I should have.