iMac Won't Boot

[alansmallen]

Hey guys. A couple of nights ago, my iMac randomly turned on in the middle of the night, so I held the back power button to shut it off. Later that morning, I tried to turn it on and was left with this screen (see attachment). I was very confused. After trying to boot into target mode, safe mode, the assorted...I restored the computer. It seems to work fine now, but I'm still wondering...what the happened?

Thanks,
Alan

 

[WRXHokie]

This is what's happening with my iMac as of this morning. How do you boot into those different modes?

I tried putting my Leopard disc in but it won't boot from it.

 

[T10HJS]

That looks rather serious.
Thought i would post it to bump the thread, and because I'm interested in what has happened and what can be done to resolve it just incase i ever have this issue.
Hope you get it sorted

 

[UltraNEO*]

Looks like the HD has become corrupted or damaged, possibly dead?
Did you try booting for the original Mac OSX DVD?

 

[UltraNEO*]

Hey guys. A couple of nights ago, my iMac randomly turned on in the middle of the night, so I held the back power button to shut it off. Later that morning, I tried to turn it on and was left with this screen (see attachment). I was very confused. After trying to boot into target mode, safe mode, the assorted...I restored the computer. It seems to work fine now, but I'm still wondering...what the happened?

Thanks,
Alan

Forcing the system to shut down, is never good! Cause your cutting power to hard drives that are spinning at high speed, head's reading your data.
Being able to restore the system is just having good luck.. doing this too often and you'll find you'll have a dead hard-drive on your hands.

 

[WRXHokie]

Went to the Apple Store last night. Genius's were stumped. Think it might be a HDD failure, or possibly a logic board failure.

I'm hoping the former.

 

[alansmallen]

I restored the OS and is good as new...for now.