Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

bvillet

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 14, 2023
1
0
Hello,

Could someone look at this and see if it appears to be corrupted?

I’m troubleshooting an iMac that was working fine and then there was a series of power outages and afterwards the iMac does not POST. Diagnostic LED #1 and #2 are illuminated, but not #3. I did a quick visual inspection of the logic board and found no visibly bad/burned components and found no shorts. I swapped RAM and CPU with a known good and still behaves the same. I have also reset NVRAM and SMC numerous times.

The lack of Diagnostic LED#3 is supposed to mean “logic board unable to communicate with GPU”, but if the computer wasn’t POSTing due to a corrupt BIOS, it would behave like this as well. I thought it could be a corrupt EFI.

Looking at my dump in UEFITool, the parser indicates that there may be some corruption, but I honestly don’t know enough about BIOS/EFI/UEFI editing/repairing or UEFITool to interpret the parser output, but the wording certainly makes it sound like something isn’t right.

I’m attaching a dump of my original EFI which I suspect is corrupt as well as a supposedly clean EFI I found online for this model and finally, a screenshot of the parser output in UEFITool. It's interesting that when opening the "clean" EFI in UEFITool, the parser does not have the same errors as my original one does. I don't know if that means anything or not.

I was hoping someone experienced with Apple EFI corruption could just look at what I have here and help guide me in the right direction. Right now, it appears that the EFI seems to be corrupt, so I need to get this fixed and then observe the iMac behavior after I flash a new EFI to the chip and then potentially resume troubleshooting once I know the EFI is good if it doesn't fix my problem.

Thank you.
 

Attachments

  • 69d4378079bdafc4491ce2fe8ef3034a9771d382.png
    69d4378079bdafc4491ce2fe8ef3034a9771d382.png
    8.8 KB · Views: 98
  • 820-01237-a_original_maybecorrupt.zip
    5.8 MB · Views: 43
  • clean 820-001237-A IMAC 2019.zip
    5.6 MB · Views: 39
Last edited:
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.