Gray Screen - No Apple, No Spinning Gear, No Fun

[tintrout]

I hate to say I found this forum in a time of crisis as today I experienced a minor 1/2 second power outage which was just enough to shut down my 24" 2.8ghz iMac and now cannot get it to fully startup.

When I try to restart all the farther it gets is a gray screen with no apple or spinning gear. I've tried rebooting many times with various keyboard commands in order to isolate the problem and can't get anything to work. I've tried booting in safe mode using the shift key - nothing. Booting holding down the "C" key in order to boot from the CD - nothing. Screaming obscenities - nothing.

However, holding down command+option+p+r to clear the PRAM does seem to work as it proceeds to reboot 3 times after that as advertised. (Not that PRAM needed to be cleared but worth trying.)

I'm at a loss to what to try next. Is there some magical startup keyboard command I'm not aware of? Any other way to prod the OS into loading? Anything? I'm starting to freak out a bit.

 

[sourcehound]

This is certainly a hard disk or hard disk controller issue. I'd try to boot off of another drive to see if the hard drive will even show up as an option - the installer disk should do the trick, but it it's under warranty, a trip to a service center is probably in the cards for you.

 

[tintrout]

Thanks for the pointers Sourcehound. I'd love to get it to boot off a CD just to verify however I'm having some significant trouble doing so. I've tried holding the "C" key down during reboot to no avail. Is there any other way to get an iMac to boot via CD?