Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

creativepart

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 3, 2021
1
0
We came home from a month-long RV trip and found the circuit breaker was tripped for my office. The UPS was out of power and my Mid-2011 27" iMac, which had been left plugged in but turned off would only boot up with hundreds of brightly colored vertical lines on the screen. After trying a number of reboots, resets and pram resets I gave up and bought a new 23" M1 iMac. It was time.

So, I moved the iMac into a spare bedroom to deal with later. Now, it's about a month later and I decided to deal with the old iMac. Even if I decide to sell it or trash it I need to wipe the hard drive. So, I'd like to boot it up.

Today, I plugged it in and booted it up. Now, instead of hundreds of brightly colored vertical lines the screen is black - sort of - with some faint light lines, just a few nothing major. But I still have no way to complete booting and figure out how to wipe the HD.

The question is... can I get a Thunderbolt 2 to HDMI cable and plug into another monitor and use that to boot and log in? Since I don't know if the problem is the video card... or the LCD panel I don't know what will work and what wont.

Here's a photo of the ports on the back of the iMac. I was going to post a photo of the brightly colored vertical lines on the screen but since they have somehow disappeared I can't do that.

. imacports.jpg
 
This is the standard procedure to wipe out your iMac HDD.
1. Open the iMac. There are at least 10 youtube videos on how to open a mid-2011 iMac.
2. Take out the HDD
3. Go to hammer.com or handrill.com to download the tools.
4. Apply the tool to your HDD.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.