iMac Won't Boot/Keyboard & Mouse Unresponsive

[Shortnsweet]

Yesterday I had to boot into Windows XP via Bootcamp to look at something for school. My iMac froze hopelessly, so I restarted. Now, it will not boot up. I can get to the Windows XP logo and then the screen goes black.

To make it worse, the keyboard and mouse are completely unresponsive, so I cannot bring up the start up disks to boot into OS X. I have tried using my Apple bluetooth keyboard and mouse as well as a wired USB keyboard and mouse for Windows.

I have also tried completely unplugging the computer, to no avail. There is a disk in the drive that I can't get out, as well.

Any suggestions? Help? I am about 90 days out of my warranty with Apple.

 

[madog]

Have you tried plugging the keyboard into a different port on the Mac? If you plug the mouse into the keyboard, unplug it and put them into their own ports on the computer. Then when you boot up the machine try holding down the option key to boot into Mac. If not, try using just the mouse, or just the keyboard plugged into the computer (try both in the different ports). If that works, maybe the Windows partition is screwy, or maybe one of the devices is killing the other or drawing too much power from it. It's possible that a keyboard/mouse can get crazy enough to mess up a computer, although it is unlikely.

It's possible that some combination of keyboard/mouse and/or disk complications with Windows are messing things up. With a mouse plugged in, you can hold the left click during boot up which will attempt to eject any disk in the machine. (a bad optical drive can also cause problems if sending bad or improper signals to the machine).

Keep in mind that a corporate Apple store has almighty power to do anything. 90 days is probably too long, but if you make a convincing argument or cry in front of the right person they might be able to help ya.