Salvage faulty iMac

[leewilson78]

Hi there,

I have an old iMac that seems to be having hard drive problems, the screen stays grey for several minutes, then I get the question mark graphic. If I restart say about 50 times (yeah, that much), the odd time it will work. I assume this cannot be repaired, however I was wondering if the following is possible:

I have an external Lacie Hard Drive (250GB) and was wondering if I could install OS X on there, either from the login via my iMac or via an installation on my Macbook Pro, then setup my faulty iMac to boot from the Lacie Hard drive, my iMac display, DVD-Rom appear to be working fine.

Incidentally, I tried running the Apple Hardware diagnostic CD, I get the following error:

Invalid memory access at SRR0: ae0c0108 0c01086

I have updated the memory on this iMac, sometime ago, it show ups fine in system info, not sure what the above means tbh, can anyone help.

Thanks

 

[Spanky Deluxe]

Hi there,

I have an old iMac that seems to be having hard drive problems, the screen stays grey for several minutes, then I get the question mark graphic. If I restart say about 50 times (yeah, that much), the odd time it will work. I assume this cannot be repaired, however I was wondering if the following is possible:

I have an external Lacie Hard Drive (250GB) and was wondering if I could install OS X on there, either from the login via my iMac or via an installation on my Macbook Pro, then setup my faulty iMac to boot from the Lacie Hard drive, my iMac display, DVD-Rom appear to be working fine.

Incidentally, I tried running the Apple Hardware diagnostic CD, I get the following error:

Invalid memory access at SRR0: ae0c0108 0c01086

I have updated the memory on this iMac, sometime ago, it show ups fine in system info, not sure what the above means tbh, can anyone help.

Thanks

What model iMac is it? By "old" do you mean iMac G3 (the first one) or iMac G4 (the lampshade one)? Also if your iMac is a G3 then does it have firewire? If it does have firewire then you could try installing OS X to that. Does it boot from install CDs OK?

 

[leewilson78]

I removed the ram that I upgraded, now it boots fine, at least it did straight away, very happy right now gonna try it again.