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PhillyGuy72

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Sep 13, 2014
3,073
4,650
Philadelphia, PA USA
Eh, I have to calm down after these odd issues. This was a new one for me though.

Kind of started overnight, I put my older iMac to sleep, but it restarted by itself about 90 min later (it's done this before, random times). I'll get up, wait until the desktop appears, icons load, then shut it down. But doing that last night, the CPU didn't shut down...just a black dim lit screen that hung there. I had to manually hit power in the back to turn it off. I hate doing that..I had no other option.

This morning, I hit power...walked away to get coffee, come back to a plain white screen - no Apple logo, nothing. o_O
(Insert panic feelings, and I'm not even 1/2 awake yet!)

Shift+Power, CMD+R..no response.
PRAM / SMC resetting...nothing.

One site I did find...THANK GOD - and perhaps this is not news to many, it was to me though.

Disconnect all USB devices from the iMac, try and restart again. That did it.
In fact, this was the fastest this Mac has booted up in a long time with the SSD I put in last Summer.

(I have a 4TB and a 2TB drive connected to this), I have a feeling this older 2TB is causing big issues for some odd reason, it was acting funky about 3 weeks ago, I reformatted it. After plugging this back into the USB, it took 2-3 minutes for the drive to even show up on the desktop, not normal.

So..big sigh of relief for now. Just very happy this wasn;t the main hard drive going dead!

If anyone has this kind of trouble....try unplugging everything from the rear of the Mac - all USB, all external hard drives.
Try a restart again. See what happens.
 
Last edited:

0128672

Cancelled
Apr 16, 2020
5,962
4,783
Glad to hear you got it resolved! And definitely know that feeling about needing to deal with a tech issue before being fully awake ☕️☕️☕️☕️☕️☕️☕️
 
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Reactions: PhillyGuy72

mbosse

macrumors 6502a
Apr 29, 2015
629
199
Vienna, Austria
Eh, I have to calm down after these odd issues. This was a new one for me though.

Kind of started overnight, I put my older iMac to sleep, but it restarted by itself about 90 min later (it's done this before, random times). I'll get up, wait until the desktop appears, icons load, then shut it down. But doing that last night, the CPU didn't shut down...just a black dim lit screen that hung there. I had to manually hit power in the back to turn it off. I hate doing that..I had no other option.

This morning, I hit power...walked away to get coffee, come back to a plain white screen - no Apple logo, nothing. o_O
(Insert panic feelings, and I'm not even 1/2 awake yet!)

Shift+Power, CMD+R..no response.
PRAM / SMC resetting...nothing.

One site I did find...THANK GOD - and perhaps this is not news to many, it was to me though.

Disconnect all USB devices from the iMac, try and restart again. That did it.
In fact, this was the fastest this Mac has booted up in a long time with the SSD I put in last Summer.

(I have a 4TB and a 2TB drive connected to this), I have a feeling this older 2TB is causing big issues for some odd reason, it was acting funky about 3 weeks ago, I reformatted it. After plugging this back into the USB, it took 2-3 minutes for the drive to even show up on the desktop, not normal.

So..big sigh of relief for now. Just very happy this wasn;t the main hard drive going dead!

If anyone has this kind of trouble....try unplugging everything from the rear of the Mac - all USB, all external hard drives.
Try a restart again. See what happens.
You may want to install DriveDX and their additional USB plugin to check the health status of your connected drives. Probably this gives you a clue as why your 2 TB is acting up.

Best,
Magnus
 

PhillyGuy72

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Sep 13, 2014
3,073
4,650
Philadelphia, PA USA
You may want to install DriveDX and their additional USB plugin to check the health status of your connected drives. Probably this gives you a clue as why your 2 TB is acting up.

Best,
Magnus
I'll give it it try, thank you! Right now that 2TB drive will show an icon after a few minutes plugging it in, but as for reading anything thats on it...no luck. Just a spinning rainbow wheel. Disk Utility wont totally load unless I disconnect that 2tb drive. Not a major loss if that thing is shot.

Nguyen Duc Hieu - Yeah, I still had a 3rd party iPhone charger/dock attached to the Mac, but had this charing my AirPods. But I removed that and have it charging in another spot. Anything to put less power strain on this older iMac.
 
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