System is very fragile and has trouble booting. Hard Drive Problem?
Im having a problem with my Intel iMac which I can't solve and it really annoying me. As of lately my mac has been crashing, a lot. I am running Snow Leopard 10.6.2 on my 2008 24" iMac.
In the order that I remember them happening, here are the symptoms:
1. Applications would not start, from the dock to from spotlight.
2. Pressing OptionCommandEscape showed no applications in the Force Quit dialogue.
3. Rebooting solved the problems for a while.
4. Starting the Disk Utility in OS X will trigger 1.
5. My fiancees account will not log in, it either freezes on the wallpaper or kicks me back to the login screen. Making the keyboard not work to type in my password on my account.
6. Rebooting the machine now often results in booting to a folder with a ? (question mark) on it.
7. Most recently I lost the drive completely and could not boot into anything.
Here is what i have done to try fix it.
A. I have ran the repair disk in disk utility by booting from the install CD. However now (see 7.) I cannot even see the drive in the utility to try again.
B. I booted with Command + s to enable the console and typed /sbin/fsck -sy a few times
C. Holding Option while booting will NOT show my HDD only the CD
D. I reset the PRAM by holding CommandOption+PR during boot. This doesnt seem to have done anything.
E. to resolve 7. I pulled the power cord out for 30 mins. Then it booted.... weird
The machine overall feels very fragile and I cannot do anything with it really and its amazing if it even boots up. What are my options? The only thing I have not tried is a full reinstall of OS X. However it feels like more of a hardware issue, will this fix it? I'm not sure.
Thank you for looking and any suggestions are welcome.
Cheers.
Andrew
Message was edited by: Jamsen
First, make sure your user data is backed up.
Instead of just unplugging it, use the reset SMC procedure
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964
which is unplugging the iMac and reconnecting using a precise procedure. You should disconnect ALL cables when you do this. If you have been connecting the power cord to a power strip, connect it directly to a wall outlet for this test. Power up with nothing connected, except the power cord. If it does start up from the hard drive, connect only your keyboard/mouse and use it that way, doing the things that caused problems. Any improvement?
If not, the next thing you should try, since you have already done good troubleshooting, is probably to erase the hard drive and reinstall the software. There is a way to do this and give the hard drive a good test, so you can post back if you want more info.
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