Resolved Possibly Bricked.. Need ideas

[forty2j]

Apple, now would be a really good time to launch those 2012 iMacs. In the meantime, I need some ideas to see if I can coax mine back to life.

Some kind of power outage apparently hit my neighborhood yesterday. Came home to clocks the wrong time, etc. iMac off. Here's some steps I've taken. This is the mid-2007 C2D 24", running Lion.
Last night:
- Powered on. Stared at a blank white screen for a while.
- Powered off. Powered on. Stared at a blank white screen for a while.
- Found my Snow Leopard CD. Inserted. Powered off. Powered on, holding "C". Stared at a white screen with a hamster wheel and an Apple logo for a while.
- Powered off. Powered on, holding "D". Started at a white screen with a hamster wheel, an Apple logo, and a progress bar for a while. This actually eventually got to my desktop (though, I was expecting the hardware diagnostics tool).
- Rebooted, holding down nothing. Same result - hamster wheel, Apple logo, progress bar for a long time, desktop. Both times I got to the desktop, the SL CD was recognized.
- Ran Disk Utility off the HDD. Verify disk showed counts mismatched, "disk is corrupted" conclusion.
- Shut down. Powered on, holding "C". Went away to watch 2 hours of TV. Came back to hamster wheel & Apple logo. Powered off.

This morning:
- Powered on. Stared at a blank white screen for a while.
- Powered off. Powered on. Stared at a blank white screen for a while.
- Powered off. Powered on, holding "C". Stared at a blank white screen for a while.
- Powered off. Powered on, holding "Shift-Cmd-V". Staring at a blank white screen. ("safe boot")

It sounds like it's trying to do something. I hear fan speeds changing and the ODD occasionally engaging or docking.

Looking for some ideas to get the hamster going, at least long enough to back up some data to external. The other Mac in the house is a late '08 unibody MacBook (no FireWire).

UPDATE: Letting the "safe boot" request continue without interruption got me to a white screen with a blinking question mark folder.

 

[Johnf1285]

I want to say that there is an issue with the disk.

My wife's mid 2007 20" iMac suffered a similar fate. Many reboots. Difficulty getting to the desktop. Disk coming up as corrupted. Unsuccessful Snow Leopard installs. Etc.

It had originally a 250gb Caviar Blue in there. The disk just finally crapped out. So we replaced it with a 1tb Caviar Black. It ran like a champ for months until we sold it for her to upgrade. This happened last summer.

We troubleshot the issue with a Firewire enclosure and a spare disk laying around.

Do you have an extra disk laying around that you could attempt to install OS X on externally? That can help troubleshoot the computer and narrow down if there is an issue with the internal disk or something else.


Edit - Once we got the disk out of the iMac, we were able to place it into an external drive bay and save the files from it using a disk utility software - I think Disk Warrior. I honestly cannot remember. But we were able to save the files. It took hours and hours to transfer 100gb or so.

 

[forty2j]

For whatever reason, after the safe boot took me to blinky-folder-land, it then proceeded to boot off the still-inserted snow leopard CD. Successfully. Disk utility repaired and claims to have repaired successfully. Fingers and toes crossed. I'm afraid to reboot :-D

 

[chevalier433]

Sorry to say but I think your hard drive failed use a guide and change it yourself.

 

[Fishrrman]

Something to try:

Do this from "dead cold", that is, power all the way off:
1. Press the startup button
2. IMMEDIATELY hold down the "T" key (just "T", not "Command-T") and KEEP HOLDING IT DOWN.
3. Do you get the "floating firewire icon"?

 

[forty2j]

Thanks for the ideas guys. Everything appears to be working normally after the disk utility repaired. I'll advise if something else breaks...

 

[forty2j]

And.. after downloading & installing FUSE and an NTFS driver, I'm successfully copying data to the external. Crisis averted.