Old iMac shuts down on startup

Question

Was hoping to help a friend erase his old iMac disk and reinstall OS so that he can recycle it, but it hung up at finding the hard drive on reinstall and then after quitting Install, it now shuts down on every startup. I've tried resetting PRAM, hardware test, etc., restarting from install disks with no success. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Try holding down the option key then power on. This brings up the startup manager. Click on your hd. Click on right arrow key.
Sometimes if volumes don't appear in Startup Manager (what you get when you hold down the Option key at startup), you need to reset the Mac's PRAM, NVRAM, and Open Firmware. Shut down the Mac, then power it up, and before the screen lights up, quickly hold down the Command, Option, P, and R keys, until the Mac has chimed twice more after the powerup chime. Then, before the screen lights up, hold down Command-Option-O-F until the Open Firmware screen appears. Then enter these lines, pressing Return after each one:
reset-nvram
set-defaults
reset-all
"The reset-all command should restart your Mac. If so, you have successfully reset the Open Firmware settings."
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1812?viewlocale=en_US
How to eject a cd from the internal cd drive:
eject cd
List of devices:
devalias