iMAC 24 inch Intel Won't Boot

Z

Zimbop

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Help! iMac 24 inch, Leopard, get's stuck on the apple screen during startup. The spinning "pre-loader" simply freezes.

Here's an odd thing ... the same thing happens if I try to boot from a CD (applecare tech tool pro disk and various other utility disks I have).

Here are some things I've tried:

[1] Zap Pram (no change)
[2] Safe mode (took longer then froze again)
[3] Target Disk - Tech Tool > Smart status (Passed)
[4] Target Disk - Tech Tool > Volume Structure (Passed)

I'm currently waiting a few hours for a Hard drive clone via disk utility to complete, in the meantime, anyone have any suggestions for other solutions to try when that is complete?
 
The first thing I'd try is pulling out one RAM chip at a time (if you have more than one chip installed) to see if a bad RAM module is causing the freeze at start-up. Or else try some known good RAM.
 
Tried that. Sadly not the cause in this case. Successfully cloned the harddrive. Tried a few more things.

[5] Boot to Leopard CD in verbose mode (froze again)
[6] Boot to startup manager (startup manager appear and shows HD and CD's everything freezes)
 
Could be a bad optical drive or optical drive cable causing the issues. I wouldn't suspect the HD since it is letting you image it. But the best way to troubleshoot at this point is to take it apart and disconnect optical first to see if it behaves, then the HD and try to boot to the optical.
 
Zimbop said:
Help! iMac 24 inch, Leopard, get's stuck on the apple screen during startup. The spinning "pre-loader" simply freezes.

Here's an odd thing ... the same thing happens if I try to boot from a CD (applecare tech tool pro disk and various other utility disks I have).

Here are some things I've tried:

[1] Zap Pram (no change)
[2] Safe mode (took longer then froze again)
[3] Target Disk - Tech Tool > Smart status (Passed)
[4] Target Disk - Tech Tool > Volume Structure (Passed)

I'm currently waiting a few hours for a Hard drive clone via disk utility to complete, in the meantime, anyone have any suggestions for other solutions to try when that is complete?
Click to expand...

Depending on where you cloned the hard drive, I would boot off an external drive of some sort by moving those cloned contents to a drive and see if that works.
 
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