First the power went out. Then the power went back on. The Imac does not. If I push the button in the back (on/off switch) it makes the musical sound, the little blinking light in the lower right hand corner comes on, the apple icon and the little little animated rotating thing appears, it goes to a blue screen and then nothing. Is there any trick I can try to make it boot. Any buttons to push that will allow it to self diagnose? Should I try to boot from my CD? Any advice will be most helpful.
When Steve Jobs said PowerPC was now obsolete, he meant it.
Sounds like you can’t boot from the hard drive (could be bad). Try booting from the CD (hold down ‘C’ at powerup) or if you have a firewire drive, from a backup drive(‘T’). Or try ‘⌘V’ (for verbose logging to give you some more information), or hold down option to see what’s available.
Try also starting up with shift held down. This is ‘safe mode’.
Disk tools run from the install CD is a good idea. Start up off the install CD and select disk tools from the utilities menu.
You can also try zapping P-RAM, but i’ve not really heard of that helping since the OS-9 days. Hold down command-option-P-R on start up.
If none of that helps, come on back.
If all else fails, take it to the Apple Store, and have the genius bar people fix it. They’ll do quite a bit before they charge you.
Is it an older G-5 iMac? If so have you gotten your recall notice? If not, that may be the problem.
I had that same problem when I accidentally unplugged my new iMac G5. That apparently inserts an incompatible login item in the Login Items folder. The following is Apple’s own advice.
To find out if you have an incompatible login item:
- Shut down your computer and wait 30 seconds.
- Press the power button.
- Immediately after you hear the startup tone, press and hold the Shift key.
- Release the Shift key when you see the gray Apple and progress indicator (the “spinning gear”).
- Choose Apple menu > System Preferences.
- Click Accounts, then click Login Items.
- Make a list of the login items–you’ll need to remember them later.
- Select all of the login items and click Remove.
- Choose Apple menu > Restart.
If this solves the problem, open Accounts preferences again and add the login items one at a time, restarting your computer after adding each one, until the symptom occurs again. (You can start up your computer normally when you’re adding the login items.) When you’ve found the incompatible login item, use the procedure above to remove just the problem item.