I have late 2006 iMac 24" and I cannot boot it up. I have tried everything but it will only come up in safe boot. I can, at last, boot up on the option key and it now gives me the option of the Recover HD but when I select this, it still won't boot up?

Question

When I select the Recovery drive it tries and then I can't get further than a white screen. My curser so has 2 columns of marks like a horizontal barcode. I think it's a software problem. When I boot up in safe boot, I have run the disc utility and it says the disc is fine and I have run the repair permissions  but it makes  no difference.

Answer 1

Thanks AAndy but I had read all of that and tried everything but I have no disks as I upgraded from Snow Leopard over the internet.  I have my Snow Leapard box but the disk is missing so I can't use that and anyway, I can only boot up in safe boot so it wouldn't recognise the superdrive.  I had a copy of the recovery on a flash but it doesn't recognise that.  I have redownloaded it but cannot get it onto an external because of safe boot.  I have done the following
Reset the PRam, reset the desktop.
Tried the D key - no responce
Tried opt D and Command D - no responce
Comant R, jusr R and opt R - no responce
By no responce, I mean that the wheel goes round under the apple and then it goes white - and stays like that.
The only thing that I can do, is to boot up on the option key when it give me a choice of drive.  If I select Recover, wheel turns under apple - white wcreen
If I boot up on the shift key, it boots into safe mode and there it stays, quite happy surfing the internet and playing stupid Facebook games, so long as I don't want to use any search engines (none of which work (not finder, not mail, not anything) and then after a few hours of forgotton pleasure, it crashes!
The only thing I can think of to do is to redownload Lion - it appears in my purchased account in the App Store but, Sod's law, our satellite internet is not working and I don't think my phone account has enough MBs - anyone know how many Lion is?
I can't backup because I can't use an external drive and old one stopped working a few months ago, so I haven't been backing up and as this is the first problem I have ever had with my iMac in 7 years, I had got a bit comlascent! However, I am pretty certain that I can re-install Lion without wiping my hard drive - I have done it years ago with an older system and an older Mac.
Do you think that downloading Lion again and re-installing it will help?  Does anyone else have any suggestions?
Thanks for responding so far.