iMac 24" headscratcher of note!!

[wingnutz]

this could well be the most unanswerable/unsolvable/insurmountable dilemma of the day, but then I'm new to this particular forum so am not aware of the potential genius that lurks herein.

Here's the situation as best I can describe it -

I have the old 24" iMac which has followed me around for a good 7 years I think, I installed Leopard then Snow Leopard and been using boot camp since the very first beta releases to run a Windows Vista 32bit partition. The partitions are more or less equally sized and I use both all the time with some of my design work requiring Windows but Mac OS being my default of course.

The machine has been through a lot but served me flawlessly until about 2 years ago....first to go was the display with a solid hairline appearing vertically and permanently across my screen (still there), next was my disc drive which started spitting written discs out or if it accepted them it would see them as blank discs ready to be written. It got worse to where it now doesn't accept any disc, DVD or CD in either OS no matter what I do.

I might also mention that some time before that I region locked the drive to region 1 which is unfortunately the rarer region code in South Africa.

Then one dark day about a year ago when I booted up into the default startup which was OSX I got the famous spinning globe, I never recovered that despite following several forums' advice step by step but what eventually
did happen is the spinning globe became the grey startup screen with a progress bar and it just won't boot up. I can run Windows just fine but can't do any administration from there and because of my screwed drive I can't run the OSX install discs which is apparently what's required to repair the progress bar issue. I have also been noticing really frustrating failures of the usb ports to where mostly peripheral devices fail or don't work at all when plugged in. Joystick for instance will work fine then mid flight suddenly 'uncallibrate' badly or the mouse will suddenly run right out of screen or be unrecognized completely - same for the keyboard, Apple keyboard or standard PC types, makes no difference.

I have also started noticing "display driver crashes' all the time in Windows and windows itself has become unstable sometimes rebooting by itself mid project and even a few blue screens recently. I run MS Flight sim on Vista which used to work beautifully on quite high settings, I now have to bring the display settings right down and even then the screen flickers or flashes random shapes and lines all the time. I have uninstalled all games now and only bare minimum programs on windows to get by and am actually ready to wipe the machine completely to try and recover my trusty mac.

Is it fixable or is my machine finally fried? Can anyone help with the specific issues mentioned so that perhaps one by one I can at least get my OSX back and try to hammer out some sort of life fro this thing? I have a Macbook Pro 13" too but since I hate Lion and need to purchase a screen I haven't used it much and would really really like to save the iMac.

Bear in mind that the concept of simply taking the machine in to a repairer is not that simple here in SA, prices for any Apple repair are extreme since there is a monopoly on the market by one major group, the iMac was dropped very early in it's life with me and I naively took it in for repair which ultimately cost me 1.5 times what a new metal iMac would cost today!!

Help please guys, I am a passionate Mac user but losing patience and hope now.

 

[justperry]

Seems like an unstable power supply to me, many of your issues point towards this.

Oh, and if you ask help always provide All details, minimum required is model identifier and current OS X version.

 

[fhall1]

Can you use an external USB CD drive to try and boot the install discs from?

 

[wingnutz]

thanks for the reply, I was neither notified of the response nor has this forum listed my thread as even existing in my profile. Ok to answer your question, I bought a flippen pricey Apple Magic drive which it doesn't even recognize I have thought that if I could get my hands on an external drive I might manage a disk repair but haven't tried it yet no.

The issue I am currently trying to solve is the annoying display driver issue in Vista obviously (since it is the only OS working) or whatever it is that causes the flickering, shapes ad flashes whilst playing games and the lines and colors that appear when I use any of my drawing and editing programs (CS4, Corel etc) I often get blue screens and complete system crashes especially when playing FSX which I have now uninstalled btw.

For now I would like to deal with this specifically - any ideas what is going on and what I can do?

 

[justperry]

thanks for the reply, I was neither notified of the response nor has this forum listed my thread as even existing in my profile. Ok to answer your question, I bought a flippen pricey Apple Magic drive which it doesn't even recognize I have thought that if I could get my hands on an external drive I might manage a disk repair but haven't tried it yet no.

The issue I am currently trying to solve is the annoying display driver issue in Vista obviously (since it is the only OS working) or whatever it is that causes the flickering, shapes ad flashes whilst playing games and the lines and colors that appear when I use any of my drawing and editing programs (CS4, Corel etc) I often get blue screens and complete system crashes especially when playing FSX which I have now uninstalled btw.

For now I would like to deal with this specifically - any ideas what is going on and what I can do?

We didn't include your initial post in our replies because it was too long, that's why you didn't get any notification.

Next, you still don't include what System you are running and what hardware you have.

 

[wingnutz]

t

I have the old 24" iMac which has followed me around for a good 7 years I think, I installed Leopard then Snow Leopard and been using boot camp since the very first beta releases to run a Windows Vista 32bit partition. The partitions are more or less equally sized and I use both all the time with some of my design work requiring Windows but Mac OS being my default of course.

I realize my post was long but I described the situation as clearly as I could with all the information I have in hand. To shorten it would be to leave out some of what is all important details IMHO.

As for hardware what do I need to specify and where can I find the relevant info (from within Vista)?

Thanks chaps

 

[DLary]

Use your Macbook pro to make a bootable USB drive and try that. I also had the long boot with a progress bar on my 24 iMac. It turned out to be a file system error that required Disk Warrior to recover from. Turned out the hard drive was failing. Some of your other issues sound like overheating could be a problem. You might try to blow out your fans with compressed air.

 

[Fishrrman]

After 7 years, it's time to start thinking about a new iMac.

Get a new one, and do what you can to get the data off of the old drive. There are ways to do this.

That should solve your problems!

 

[macthefork]

1. The screen issue with a vertical line was a well known problem with the earlier imacs that Apple addressed by replacing the displays through an extended screen warranty (long since expired). That issue probably requires, at a minimum, a new screen.

2. The optical drive in these units was not robust and have a high failure rate. You could try cleaning it with an optical drive disk cleaner, which may or may not help. If it doesn't, you can figure it's a failed optical drive.

3. Sounds like you also have a failing Hard Drive with bad sectors. There may be a way to boot into OS X by repairing the disk with a utility such as Disk Warrior. However, the HDD will likely need to be replaced because, if it's a bad sector issue like it sounds, it only gets worse.

It sounds from your description that iMac is on it's last legs and would be too expensive to replace all those items to end up with a 7 year old iMac with some new parts. Might be better to consider a newer used iMac, or a refurbished or new one.

 

[Homer2556]

I think I have a similar issue. I thought the optical drive was bad, as it would not recognize a disc. I just replaced it with one I purchased from OWC, but still have the same issue. Everything else works correctly. Any thoughts?

iMac 7,1 24" 2.8 GHz Extreme, OS X 10.8.3