Help!! iMac Won’t Boot!

[Vado]

My late 2013 iMac has decided to stop working on me. I restarted after noticing some sluggish performance and now it will not boot back in to macOS at all.

Specs
Late 2013
27”
3.5Ghz i7
32GB RAM
1TB Fusion Drive
4GB GeForce GTX780M

I get the normal boot chime and Apple logo with boot status bar but it’s going incredibly slowly. If I leave it for awhile the boot status bar does eventually go white but macOS doesn’t load. On one occasion it the status bar did load but all I got was a black screen and a beach ball.

I’ve tried:

• Booting into Safe Mode
• Booting into Recovery Mode
• Booting into Internet Recovery Mode
• Resetting SMC & PRAM

All unsuccessfully

I’ve also tried booting in Verbose and Single User Mode. When booted in Verbose the screen was moving quickly with text, so couldn’t get a photo on my iPhone but it was reporting corruption to files

This is a photo from Single User Mode boot, again mentioning corruption to files.

Everything I’ve tried so far has been unsuccessful to get it to successfully boot.

Anyone have any ideas?

 

[BrianBaughn]

Sometimes seeing the hang point in verbose mode can help but in this case I don't know. What version of macOS it on it?

 

[Vado]

Sometimes seeing the hang point in verbose mode can help but in this case I don't know. What version of macOS it on it?

Catalina - the latest update version.

 

[BrianBaughn]

Can you run the Apple Hardware Test? https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201257

 

[Vado]

Can you run the Apple Hardware Test? https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201257

The diagnostic test found nothing wrong.

I’ve tried repairing the file system in Single User mode without success, I get an error about mounting disk.

I’m beginning to think the internal drive has died 😥

 

[Fishrrman]

It seems to me that even if the internal drive failed, you should still be able to start up in internet recovery mode.

Do you have access to another Mac?
If so, try connecting the two via USB and see if you can get into "target disk mode":
Boot the 2013 iMac first and IMMEDIATELY hold down the "T" key and keep holding it down.
Do you get the "target disk" symbol?

If this doesn't work, the next thing I would try is to use an external drive with a copy of the OS on it that is FULLY BOOTABLE TO THE FINDER (tm backups cannot do this).
This ought to give you a boot even if the internal is dead.

 

[Vado]

Managed to find a well reviewed local independent repair shop. They are going to remove the fusion drive (both mechanical and 128GB SSD) and replace it with a 1TB PCI-E SSD blade.

That will see me through until I decide to upgrade my iMac.

Once I get it back I’ll just restore from my Time Machine backup.

 

[BrianBaughn]

Managed to find a well reviewed local independent repair shop. They are going to remove the fusion drive (both mechanical and 128GB SSD) and replace it with a 1TB PCI-E SSD blade.

That will see me through until I decide to upgrade my iMac.

Once I get it back I’ll just restore from my Time Machine backup.

I think you'll get multiple years out of that.

 

[Vado]

I think you'll get multiple years out of that.

Thats the plan! Won’t be looking to upgrade my iMac unless Apple brings a compelling performance upgrade and major redesign.

Plus I’ve now got a nice 128GB SSD (providing that’s not what has failed) that I can buy an external enclosure for and have a nice external storage drive.

If that happened I would hope that the money I’ve spent on this upgrade will add value to any sale.