i have a mid-2007 imac running 10.6.8. a few weeks ago i replaced its hard drive. all seemed fine the first week or so but then i started to notice it was taking longer to start up. now, for the last 5 startups in a row i get the grey screen (the apple logo never appears) and nothing else. i've waited upwards of 5 minutes for something to happen but it never does. i wind up doing a hard shut down. then when i restart again, it does so just fine. very strange. so far all i've done is run disk utility but no issues were found. any ideas?
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iMac never boots on the first try
- Thread starter boynigel
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I got my 2007 repaired for that exact behavior twice. One of the times it was the hard drive, second time the logic board. Run Apple diagnostics or something to check if the system is ok.
I'm genuinely curious, what do you expect to see in the etrechecks logs which would affect the behavior prior to the Apple showing up at the boot screen?
Isn't the computer more or less still in EFI when that shows up?
I might have read more than necessary into OPs post. I understood it as he didn't even get the boot chime the times it failed.
Edit: by "more or less still in EFI" I mean that the Apple boot screen is displayed by the boot.efi boot loader, and if it gets stuck even before that the computer should be stuck even before attempting to boot from the hard drive?
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Make sure the next time you can get it to boot up that the startup disk is selected in System Preferences > Startup Disk. I've seen this before when a HDD has been replaced. For some reason, some older Macs occasionally had a hard time finding the Startup Disk if it's not selected in this preference. What you've described fits that error.