Late 2009 27inch iMac issues

[luke9511]

Hey everyone!

I recently picked up a late 2009 27 inch imac with 4gigs of ram and a core i5 cpu and 1tb hdd for $50 dollars,

the main display connector on the mother board had gotten pulled off and i managed to resolder it to the board and now the display is working great!

but it didnt have an OS installed and when I try to install it, it seems to install but when it starts to boot for the first time I get the apple logo with a loading bar and it loads about half way and freezes

I have tried different versions of os x to no avail, I did notice today the lcd inverter ribbon cable was not connected and damaged and have ordered a replacement, dont know if this is my issue but who knows

I also put an ssd in as I didnt know if the original hdd was the issue or not and I get the same thing, if anyone has any ideas I can try please let me know.

 

[Nguyen Duc Hieu]

Half-dead GPU?
Mine got the same issue.
On the original HDD (Yosemite), it could get to desktop, open a youtube video then it would freeze.
I baked the MXM card, now it would freeze halfway through the Apple logo on bootscreen.

Solution? Replace the HD4850 with Quadro K1100m, flash with modded vBIOS, install OCLP and I have myself a working iMac 2009 in High Sierra.
Already installed Big Sur on it, but later I removed the Big Sur SSD to use on my iMac 2010.

 

[luke9511]

If it was the gpu wouldn’t there be signs it was going bad? Other than the freezing problem there is nothing else wrong, I can boot to a recovery usb but that’s it

 

[Nguyen Duc Hieu]

If it was the gpu wouldn’t there be signs it was going bad? Other than the freezing problem there is nothing else wrong, I can boot to a recovery usb but that’s it

That's the sign it has gone bad. Light task like recovery, bootscreen is OK, but some heavy tasks such as loading the desktop will freeze the system. Replace the GPU, you will see the system work normally.

 

[luke9511]

If that’s the case then no it’s not worth it, I wasn’t going to keep it, it also can run a windows 10 pe but can’t load into OS X, oh well selling for parts it goes