iMac failing to boot into OSX

[KingTed]

I have an oldishiMac which was running El Capitan but now fails to boot up into the OS All that happens is that the screen is white with a smallish folder type icon in the middle of the screen. Is this indicating the hard disk is now Kaput? or could there be some other cause?

 

[btrach144]

Does the folder icon in the middle of the screen have a question mark (?) in it? If so, the computer can't find your hard drive and would likely indicate hard drive problems.

 

[KingTed]

Does the folder icon in the middle of the screen have a question mark (?) in it? If so, the computer can't find your hard drive and would likely indicate hard drive problems.

Yes, there is a question mark on the icon. Many thanks for the info. It looks like an HD failure although presumably it could also be a connection or a motherboard malfunction. Ah well, off to the Apple Store, thanks again.

 

[dictoresno]

I had the question mark issue once on a brand newish 2TB seagate barracuda drive in my old 2007 iMac. Ended up being a hard drive hardware issue and it was replaced by seagate under warranty.

I tried every possible solution I could find on the internet to fix it and recover the OS. A couple times I was able to get it to mount and boot when the HD was mounted in an external enclosure, which led me to think maybe it was the computers SATA cable, but after further testing, it was indeed the drive. Returning the OEM 250GB drive into the iMac, I was able to boot no problem.

 

[briloronmacrumo]

One way to validate it's the internal HD is to boot the machine from an external HD ( such as a clone ). Hold down the keyboard option key while booting and select the external drive when the screen shows the list of drives. You won't be able to use the mouse/trackpad to select from this screen but use the arrow keys and press Return to select. If it boots okay from the external you might be able to run diagnostics on the internal. Even if unable to run diagnostics, the problem is now isolated to an HD issue.

 

[nambuccaheadsau]

You are running El Capitan so use it. Boot into Recovery Mode, go into utilities and run Disk First Aid to advise the state of your hard drive.


https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT201314