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imac = mac os won't start, but win 7 does??

T

tmofee

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 27, 2009
204
0
Mildura
hey everyone... just got an odd question...

had this weird moment last night with my imac, 24" model, one of the last from 2009, where everytime I try and boot into the mac os side of things, it was sitting there for ages with the spinning wheel, and nothing. so i tried a full system restore last night, and now it tells me everytime i start up that, no luck, i need to restart my mac.

problem is, windows 7 through good ol' bootcamp seems to be working fine. i can boot into win 7 and that's what im using now. no problems, no issues.

the only thing (i know i should check these things) i did before this all happened was that i installed sp1, thinking i'll do the right thing and update both sides on the computer.

what can i try? tried the disk checking thing, does nothing. if i do a fresh reinstall from scratch and then restore from my time machine, would that work? im not too fussed if i lose the windows side of things, it's just for the odd game i play...
 
tmofee said:
hey everyone... just got an odd question...

had this weird moment last night with my imac, 24" model, one of the last from 2009, where everytime I try and boot into the mac os side of things, it was sitting there for ages with the spinning wheel, and nothing. so i tried a full system restore last night, and now it tells me everytime i start up that, no luck, i need to restart my mac.

problem is, windows 7 through good ol' bootcamp seems to be working fine. i can boot into win 7 and that's what im using now. no problems, no issues.

the only thing (i know i should check these things) i did before this all happened was that i installed sp1, thinking i'll do the right thing and update both sides on the computer.

what can i try? tried the disk checking thing, does nothing. if i do a fresh reinstall from scratch and then restore from my time machine, would that work? im not too fussed if i lose the windows side of things, it's just for the odd game i play...
Click to expand...

Had a similar issue, but it would hang in OSX at a completely blue screen with no spinning wheel. Windows 7 worked perfectly.

Turned out it needed a whole new logicboard.
 
http://guides.macrumors.com/Mac_doesn't_boot

Sounds like there might be a corrupted system file or an issue with the HFS+ file system.

twentytwo22 said:
Had a similar issue, but it would hang in OSX at a completely blue screen with no spinning wheel. Windows 7 worked perfectly.

Turned out it needed a whole new logicboard.
Click to expand...

That does not make any sense. If the logic board had failed, then Windows would not boot either. This is clearly a software issue.
 
Hellhammer said:
http://guides.macrumors.com/Mac_doesn't_boot

Sounds like there might be a corrupted system file or an issue with the HFS+ file system.



That does not make any sense. If the logic board had failed, then Windows would not boot either. This is clearly a software issue.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that doesn't make sense. If your logic board fails, your whole computer is non-fucntional.

If Windows starts, then there is something wrong with OS X. You'll probably be looking at a reinstall of some kind.
 
Considering the differences in the way that the two OSs handle hardware, it is possible that marginal hardware could cause OSX to fail, while Win 7 boots without problem. The problem could be related to the SATA controller, or related circuitry. Considering that it's designed to work with all kinds of hardware from marginal quality to high quality, the fault tolerance of Win 7 could be a factor. Since, in Macs, the hardware and OS are designed to work as a cohesive unit, out of spec operation of the hardware could cause an OS failure.

Although Win 7 successfully booted, it would probably have been a different story with XP or Vista.
 
believe it or not i THINK it did something to my boot partition or something bootcamp related. time machine restores wouldn't work, but a brand new install and using the transfer assistant thing thinking it's a new computer has got me back up and running. killed my download quota downloading all the updates again though :)
 
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