iMac doing weird things in startup.

[Retracker]

Well hello there,
I've been having this issue for a long time i have old iMac not very old but somewhat old it has the osx 10.5.8 which i think is leopard one. I've tried doing research first to fix it and now I have a different problem so let me explain. At first when I would start it up it would go to the apple logo screen that loads then it goes to a blue screen which would change its color to a darker blue and change back to a lighter blue and wont ever go to the main screen, i have left it on like that for hours and no change. After doing some searches and stuff I found out that the main reason that this occurs is because of ApplicationEnhancer and I need to delete that so I booted my mac using cmd+s which would make my mac go to a black screen with white codes and I did the exact codes that had to be done to delete Application Enhancer, the instructions i did are these:

1. Reboot into single-user mode (hold Cmd-S while booting machine)
2. Follow the directions OSX gives you when you get to the prompt ( just type /sbin/fsck -fy )
3. Remove the following files:
4. rm -rf /Library/PreferencePanes/ApplicationEnhancer.prefpane
   rm -rf /Library/Frameworks/ApplicationEnhancer.framework
   rm -rf /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/ApplicationEnhancer.bundle
   rm -f /Library/Preferences/com.unsanity.ape.plist
5. Exit, to continue booting normally

And after I typed exit and pressed return or enter button on the keyboard it went back to a blue screen but this time the cursor was showing and I could move it and about every 3-6 seconds it would go back to a black screen and the black screen sometimes would be for like a tenth of a second or a second or 2 and it would show a few white codes which I cant read it cause it keeps going back to the blue screen immediately and it keeps doing that, I was told to wait a while but i've been waiting like 30mins and nothing has happened still the same thing. If anyone can even try to help me, I would really really appreciate it.

Thank you and thank you for reading and taking your time here.

 

[briloronmacrumo]

Difficult to provide a definitive answer but the description sounds like a hardware failure. Have you tried booting with the OPTION key held down? Presumably results will be the same but if it shows boot drives it could be a clue. Also worth knowing: which specific iMac ( year and model )?

 

[Retracker]

Difficult to provide a definitive answer but the description sounds like a hardware failure. Have you tried booting with the OPTION key held down? Presumably results will be the same but if it shows boot drives it could be a clue. Also worth knowing: which specific iMac ( year and model )?

Thanks for your reply I have tried right now to boot it with the option key and it showed the disk with an arrow pointing towards it. This is my iMac: http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/imac/specs/imac-core-2-duo-2.0-20-inch-aluminum-specs.html

It's the model A1224 20 inch 2.0ghz 1gb ram 250gb storage from the year 2007

Thank you for the help again. i really appreciate it.
[doublepost=1487019814][/doublepost]Now that I've booted with the option key I entered the only disk that was shown and then the blue screen came but this time the cursor shows each time the blue color goes light and i can move it when the blue color turns dark the cursor also disappears and it keeps doing this and nothing else. Thanks.

 

[nambuccaheadsau]

Well it is pretty old and ten years is a very good run and it will always struggle with 1GB of memory installed throttling it. Do you have the original Leopard DVD that came with the machine? If so pop it in, reboot and after the chime hold down the C key and go into Utilities and run repair disk.

If that is okay, the next problem may well be the gfx card has failed.

 

[briloronmacrumo]

If the disk selection screen ( after booting with OPTION key ) comes up okay, it is possible the only issue is the hard drive. That still doesn't TOTALLY rule out the LCD or the graphics card but it's something. Do you have an external drive you can use to boot from ( could be a USB thumb drive with a bootable OS X on it )? If you can successfully boot from an external drive, that would mostly ( even when booting from an external drive, a failing internal drive can still cause issues )rule out the LCD and graphics card as the source of the problem. Changing out the hard drive is not a big deal( technically or financially ), so it could be worthwhile. There are SSD vs. HDD considerations I won't get into yet.

One thing:Gazelle.com offers to purchase this 2007 iMac in good working condition for only $18 USD, so think carefully before spending money. Good luck.