HELP! 24" White iMac with Lion Not Booting At All

[saulmr]

Hello, My 24" White iMac froze last night and we did a hard reset.

When booting, I get the gray apple, then you hear the HDD drive working, the gray gear spinning and then just a blank screen after a few minutes, but nothing at all. The strange thing is that I can see the machine on the network, both using WiFi or Ethernet, login as a user to read the HDD and it even rejects me if I put the wrong password.

One time it loaded to the point of having the wallpaper loaded with the white screen and gray apple on top, like they were superimposed and then I got a kernel panic.

SSH Is not responing, and screen sharing does not respond either.

Booting from SL DVD: Same thing. Gear gets stuck after about 5 minutes of reading and loading from the DVD.

Safe Mode: Same Thing.

Target Mode: Working and I can see the HDD. Disk Utility shows no problem with HDD after a repair for some issues.

Single User Mode: Working, was able to check the drive.

Verbose Mode: OK Until it loads the the white screen, then nothing.

Any Ideas on what I could do to solve this? It's driving me crazy although probably I will have to try reloading Lion via target mode before vising an apple store

Any suggestions on what else I could do to solve this problem are welcome! Thanks!

 

[Consultant]

You didn't say whether you can boot to recovery partition.

Hold OPTION on boot to choose.

 

[saulmr]

Nope, unable to boot from recovery partition either. Tried the OPTION to boot from HDD, Recovery Partition or SL DVD. Same result all the time.

Hardware Test does not boot either, I get the same result, stuck on white screen after the gear starts spinning and then the grey apple and gear disappear.

 

[LostSoul80]

Did you mess up via terminal with partitions (with EFI in particular)?
Can you access the log of the kernel panic you've experienced, and does the kernel panic occur often?

 

[saulmr]

No, partitions were not touched while in Single User Mode that I know.

Kernel panic only happened once, I'm going to have to look at the log and see if I can figure out something from it. Strangest thing is that the machine is available to access in the network, disks are available and login authenticated when I access the disks.

Later today I'm going to try to boot another mac with the white one in target mode and see what happens there. If I can boot a machine with that drive, most likely I am looking at a HW Failure... ugh.

 

[macdatadrive]

I believe that if disk utility says the disk is fine, it could be a graphics card problem or the motherboard. Similar thing happened to someone that i know. They split something on it. The motherboard went kapow. We booted it up, an the background came on for a couple of seconds then it went black. it was still on but no picture. i'm not saying you split something but you should check them.