Brand new iMac won't boot properly!

West Wales Celt

Registered
Hi folks.
Friends have a brand spanking iMac that was running ok earlier today but now goes to a white screen with the Apple logo after the 'boot up' sound.
Unfortunately the advice line now shut til Monday.
Anyone any clue what if anything they can do?
Cheers everso...
 
insert your install DVD and power on while pressing the "C" key.
Right after the DVD boots and you select a Language you'll see a "Utilities" menu item in the top menu bar, from here you can select a Drive to startup from.
Try selecting your main boot HDD and rebooting.
Let us know how it goes.

PS:
from this menu you can also run Disk Utility and repair your Boot drive, highly recommended.
 
Thanks both.
JBarley, have passed the message on and will let you know the result if they choose to try it rather than take it back...
Cheers again!
 
N.B. Starting the machine while holding the SHIFT key will perform maintenance, including checking the hard drive.
Not quite right.
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Summary from Apple support page...

Safe Boot is a special way to start up when troubleshooting. Safe Mode is the state Mac OS X is in after a Safe Boot. To perform a Safe Boot, hold the Shift key as your Mac starts up.

Products Affected
Mac OS X 10.3, Mac OS X 10.2, Mac OS X 10.4, Mac OS X 10.6, Mac OS X 10.5, Time Capsul
Starting up into Safe Mode does several things:

It forces a directory check of the startup volume.
It loads only required kernel extensions (some of the items in /System/Library/Extensions).
In Mac OS X v10.3.9 or earlier, Safe Mode runs only Apple-installed startup items (such items may be installed either in /Library/StartupItems or in /System/Library/StartupItems; these are different than user-selected account login items).
It disables all fonts other than those in /System/Library/Fonts (Mac OS X v10.4 or later).
It moves to the Trash all font caches normally stored in /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS/(uid)/ , where (uid) is a user ID number such as 501 (Mac OS X v10.4 or later).
It disables all startup items and login items (Mac OS X v10.4 or later).
Mac OS X v10.5.6 or later: A Safe Boot deletes the dynamic loader shared cache at (/var/db/dyld/). A cache with issues may cause a blue screen on startup, particularly after a Software Update. Restarting normally recreates this cache.
Taken together, these changes can help resolve software or directory issues that may exist on the startup volume.
 
What I typed is correct. Safe boot does maintenance and disk check. "Maintenance" would be the flushing of caches.
 
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