Imac won't startup..

D

DesiMac

Registered
Hi,

Today when i turned my imac on..It started to make some weird nosies and then it froze up , So i restarted it & it worked fine for awhile & then started to make the weird nosies again , then froze.

I restarted it again & the same thing kept happening..working for awhile , then weird noises, then freezing...then eventually it stopped working altogether.

When i restarted it didnt load osx , instead now all i see is this little box with a flashing question mark in it.

I ran the Apple hardware test cd..& it scans untill item #3 'Mass storage' & then stops & says there is an error "**ERROR CODE** ata 1/6/-1 **ERROR CODE**.

Does anyone know why this is happening?

Thanks in advance.
 
The question mark means it can't find a valid system folder. Try booting up with alt/option, then it will show you available system folders to start up from. Also try resetting the PRAM by starting up with (i believe) command-p-r. Let us know what happens.
 
Yeah, the mass storage ata/1/6/-1 would mean that your hard drive is bad. That could be the sound you were hearing, the read/write heads crashing against the disk. Ouch. Do you have a diagnostic/repair program? If it was the read/write heads crashing, you'll have bad blocks and won't be able to read any data from them, but you may be able to save some of the stuff on the drive.

You'll definitely need a new drive, though.
 
Things happen.
Hard Drives do fail, that's why the number one rule of computing is Backup
 
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