Imac boots to ? Logo

[dictoresno]

First of all I've read a bunch of articles online and I'm unable to get any of them to work to get my computer to boot up properly. I was able to take out my 2 TB hard drive and put it in an external enclosure and I was successfully able to boot up into Yosemite from the external enclosure with the internal bay empty. However when I try to do anything like perform a disk scan or browse the Internet the drive reboots itself. Is that because over usb is locking it up or could there be an actual hard drive error. It appears to boot properly, well kinda. If the drive is mounted internally it won't boot at all. What are the chances it's the hard drive cable?

 

[dictoresno]

Sorry I forgot to add it's a mid 2007 iMac 20 inch. The hard drive that's in it is new as of a year and a half ago so I can't believe it would be a faulty hard drive. I'm trying to boot from other hard drives to see if I can get it to also do the same thing. It appears that it won't even boot from a secondary hard drive that I plug into the Extertal enclosure. I'm guessing it seems more like a hardware issue with the actual computer it's self other than the hard drive. I've only been able to get it to boot into OS X twice but then only to have it reboot itself before I could do anything with it.

 

[dictoresno]

I was able to get it to finally boot into OSX by using the option key at startup while the hard drive was installed into an external case. I was able to run verify disk and it found a bunch of errors however when I selected repair disk it froze and rebooted again. Sounds more like a software issue since I can get it to boot properly? I'll just keep trying to repair the disk errors. Hopefully can without it rebooting again.

 

[simonsi]

Sounds like a possibly dying HDD to me. Yes a cable can cause errors, usually the HDD reacts to that by going into read-only mode and won't format/partition.

 

[dictoresno]

Repair didn't work, the drive kept freezing it rebooting when I tried to verify it and it found a bunch of errors. I stuck an old hard drive in and booted it up to the recovery menu and it recognized it right away so the cable internally is good. Once I restore my backup hard drive with my time machine backup I'll have a working install again and will be better equipped to either repair the main drive or wipe it clean. By the way, my OSX updated to a new 10.10.4 build Friday night and finally crashed Monday morning. Wonder if the update caused this to happen. Never had an issue before. So I chose a Thursday restore date.

 

[simonsi]

Likely a coincidence in the update timing...

 

[iamMacPerson]

Likely a coincidence in the update timing...

I concur. Your HDD was probably on its last leg anyway so it wouldn't have mattered. Your best bet nowadays would be to get an external hard drive for the bulk of your data (normally your iTunes library and Photos library) and get an SSD to put in the machine to run the OS and keep your most important files on. You would see massive speed improvements within the OS, especially on newer builds of OS X (10.9 and forward).

 

[dictoresno]

Well I have two regular hard drives one internal and one in an external enclosure plus a half gig portable for backups only. Lot of redundancy. I'm back up and running again on my smaller cloned hard drive. Just need to format and restore the corrupted one tomorrow.