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iMac Continuously Reboots

G

gvegastiger

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 4, 2007
172
0
I need some help. We have an iMac at the office, but I have no idea what the specs are on it. It is an Intel machine and it has the aluminum enclosure with the black backing, probably 2 years old, and its running Leopard.

It will not boot up (which makes it difficult to know what model it is). It chimes, goes to the gray screen with Apple logo and the spinning wheel starts, and then it shuts off and starts over. Sometimes the spinning wheel starts and sometimes it doesn't before it restarts. The hard disk makes a noise like its starting up and then it stops. It has been doing this for about 1 week now.

So far I've reset the PRAM and tried to start in safe mode and neither works. Is there anything else I can try or is it borked?
 
I tried resetting the PRAM already. I read that article and tried booting into verbose mode, but it reboots at different times during the boot process.

I also tried booting into Target mode (not sure what that is exactly) and got a giant icon for Firewire floating around the screen. Does that mean something?
 
gvegastiger said:
I tried resetting the PRAM already. I read that article and tried booting into verbose mode, but it reboots at different times during the boot process.

I also tried booting into Target mode (not sure what that is exactly) and got a giant icon for Firewire floating around the screen. Does that mean something?
Click to expand...

that means you booted into target mode. Connect it to another mac with a fw cable if you can.


edit-- do you have an os disk? try and boot from that.
 
I do have a disk, how exactly do I boot from it. Do I need to hold down a key while its booting?
 
if you can boot from an external bootable drive, run a SMART utility on the drive like SMARTctl for Mac to see if there is any pending sectors. May just be a bad drive.
 
So I tried booting it from the install disk and no go. It just spins for a while and then reboots. I'm thinking its got to be the hard disk.

If theres any other troubleshooting tips you could give me, I'd appreciate it.
 
I recognize your problem. I had the same problem. At the end the hard drive died. We got the imac checked and repaired. They also replaced the power supplier (I don't know the english word, but it's the thing that divides the electricity for all the part in your pc).

I don't say it's that electricity divider thing, but I'm quite sure that your hard drive is dead. You should prepare yourself to never see it working again. I hope you have back-up.

(if there is vital information on the disk you can let it checked by a special company, but I think it's not worth that, prices go high to 100-200$ minimum).
 
gvegastiger said:
So I tried booting it from the install disk and no go. It just spins for a while and then reboots. I'm thinking its got to be the hard disk.

If theres any other troubleshooting tips you could give me, I'd appreciate it.
Click to expand...

A dead hard drive would not cause the iMac to just reboot - especially if you are booting from a CD/DVD disc. Either there is some kind of contact issue with the power button, or there is a problem with the power supply or logic board.
 
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