iMac STUCK AT LOADING SCREEN

[monopolyex]

hello,
i have recently loaded windows XP on my friends imac and am feeling really guilty because it messed up on him and i need some advice:
when it boots its stuck at the apple logo screen with the spinning wheel (of death) and its like that forever (which sucks)

and holding the option (or alt key) doesnt work because the keyboard (bluetooth) doesn't work when it boots up
neither i can't hold C (with the restore disc to restore OS X)
can anybody help me

he does not have a wired keyboard accessable so he cant press alt at bootup

(its the Bluetooth Mac Keyboard that comes with it)

anybody got a solution?

 

[DannyBres]

You ruined his Mac go get a cheap wired keyboard and fix it!

or borrow one every household nowadays probably has one you only need it for an hour!

 

[yamabushi]

No chance of borrowing a keyboard from another computer? Most keyboards should work without any trouble - it doesn't have to be one made for a Mac.

 

[GoCubsGo]

Sounds like it's confused about the OS. You should always have a wired keyboard on hand. For less than $10 you can pick one up and store it. I don't think osx is corrupted, at least in my experience when that occurs a finder icon and question mark appear. I could be wrong though. A wired keyboard is in order to troubleshoot ... At least at this point.

 

[Bernard SG]

Something similar happened to me when I attempted to install Unbutu on a Bootcamp partition. Actually, the Ubuntu worked (Gawd that thing is laaame!) but my iMac wouldn't recognize the Mac OS X partition as bootable anymore.
I had to restart from the Mac OS installation DVD, kill the non-Mac partition and re-install Mac OS X.
However, later on when I installed XP with Bootcamp, no such incident happened.
So try booting from the DVD.

 

[Hellhammer]

http://guides.macrumors.com/Mac_doesn't_boot