iMac will not start up

[jfalky]

Hello! New to this forum (The Farming Forum is more my kind of place usually!), I'm hoping for a bit of advice on an issue with my iMac. (running latest OS, can't remember which version)

When I power on it will attempt to start up, then part way through loading it will just crash and shut down.
So I started up in recovery mode (CMD+R) and tried the disk utility, when I try to run "first aid" on "Macintosh HD" I get the following message:

Any advice would be muchly appreciated as today is not going well with a poorly iMac, poorly dog and power cuts every 10 minutes!
TIA
Falky

 

[Glmnet1]

What year is your iMac? SSD, Fusion or HDD?

You can try to reinstall macOS from recovery without erasing your files.

Do you have a backup of your files? If not, are you able to access your data from the recovery?

 

[jfalky]

What year is your iMac? SSD, Fusion or HDD?

You can try to reinstall macOS from recovery without erasing your files.

Do you have a backup of your files? If not, are you able to access your data from the recovery?

It is a late 2012 iMac with HDD, I don't have a backup of the files (strangely when it first crashed that is the job I was going to do!)

When I try to run a reinstall it just states that Macintosh HDD and Recovery are locked?

 

[Glmnet1]

It is a late 2012 iMac with HDD, I don't have a backup of the files (strangely when it first crashed that is the job I was going to do!)

When I try to run a reinstall it just states that Macintosh HDD and Recovery are locked?

It's possible that your HDD is failing, sorry.

I'll let others give you advice as I'm not sure what is the best course of action now.

 

[jfalky]

It's possible that your HDD is failing, sorry.

I'll let others give you advice as I'm not sure what is the best course of action now.

That's what I fear Thanks for your time! I am running the Apple Hardware Test now to see if that brings anything up

 

[nambuccaheadsau]

The cannot be repaired is the clue. You could go for a hard drive repair utility but t around $100 put it to a new hard drive. Go for an SSD of say 512GB which will give the iMac a new lease of life. Suggest getting it installed ass they are noit the easiest machines to crack.

 

[Fishrrman]

OP wrote:
"It is a late 2012 iMac with HDD, I don't have a backup of the files (strangely when it first crashed that is the job I was going to do!)"

If you didn't keep a backup, in all likelihood your files are "gone".
You'd better plan on starting over.

You could pay to have the internal drive replaced (or try to do it yourself, but it's a risky job), but in my opinion the best course of action would be to "abandon the internal drive in place", get an external USB3 SSD, plug that in and set it up to become "the external booter" for the rest of the life of the iMac.
An external SSD will actually run faster and better than an internal HDD.
You'll LIKE the improvement in performance it gives you.

Once you have an external boot drive up and running, it -might- be possible to access the internal drive long enough to get anything important off of it. That's unsure, but again it might become possible IF you can get running "externally" first.

Can you boot to the recovery partition?
Can you boot to internet recovery?

If you can't do either, there are other options available to you.
But you have to try both of those first.