Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

OS X won't boot ...

A

Andries84

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 11, 2014
4
0
The last few days my 2009 iMac is booting very very slow. 3 days ago it needed 8 minutes to boot, yesterday it failed to boot.

I have already tried the following :
- safe boot (holding shift during boot),
- resetting PRAM,
- booting from the recovery partition.

I was able to boot from the recovery partition, but then it asks on what disk I want to install OS X. It shows my Macintosh HD, Bootcamp & Recovery partitions. All three are 'locked', meaning I can't choose any of them to reinstall 10.9.

Any help would be appreciated !

As said before, it's a 2009 iMac with intel processor, 4Gb RAM, GeForce video card and 1Tb HD.
 
It's possible that the hard drive is failing. Often when hard drives start to fail, they get very slow like that. I first suggest you back up your data then arrange to have the hard drive replaced.
 
Maybe your hard drive is failing. Can you run Disk Utility from the recovery partition?
 
I am currently working on my bootcamp partition to copy all important files to an external drive.

When booting bootcamp (windows 7), it booted at normal speed and is currently working normally. So that must mean that the problem is not my HD ? Or am I missing something ?
 
That would lead us to think the hard drive is OK. What did Disk Utility say about your Mac partition?
 
The disk utility from Win7 states that all partitions are working as they are supposed to. However it does say that the available disk space on my mac partition is 100% (while it should actually be 20%)
 
Apple Disk Utility is far from the best utility to tell whether a disk is truly OK.

Andries84 said:
… When booting bootcamp (windows 7), it booted at normal speed and is currently working normally. …
Click to expand...

If there are problems with the hard disk drive, those problems may be limited to the parts of the disk that are used by OS X.

Andries84 said:
The disk utility from Win7 states that all partitions are working as they are supposed to. …
Click to expand...

The disk checker that's integral to Windows 7 is not capable of thoroughly checking the parts of the disk that are used by OS X.

Burn for yourself a copy of Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) then you can start from that disc and run powerful utilities such as HDAT2.
 
I've had a few hard drives that were failing and Windows on Boot Camp would work fine, but OS X would run very slowly. The drives would all end up completely failing shortly after they started running very slowly in OS X.
 
Ok, so this is the result :

Apple Disk Utility unveiled something is wrong with the OS X partition and was unable to repair it :mad: After backing up all my files, i will need to format the partition and reinstall OS X.

Now the following question :
How do I format and reinstall OS X the easiest ? Do I insert my original 10.5 CD, upgrade with 10.6 CD and then upgrade again using the app store ? Or is there an easier way to do this ?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back