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patearrings

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 4, 2009
247
164
Hi guys,

I wonder if you good people can help me. I have a 2 year old imac that was working fine until last night. I had just installed the "raw photo compatibility" update (although i think this is just coincidence) and shut my computer down.

When i booted it up again 3 hours later, i got to my desktop but instead of seeing my usual 3 partitions (macintosh, home, windows xp) I only saw 2 - windows xp was missing. Not only this but my system was continuously beachballing.

I was unable to force quit so after a few minutes i held in the power button for 4 seconds until it shut down. Upon reboot, i was (and still am) only able to get to the white screen with apple logo that you get on boot up. On this screen you have a little gear spinning round. This spins for some time then just as my computer would usually boot into the O/S, the gear stops and it hangs.

Please can anyone offer me any help with this? I am running the latest version of Leopard and so far i have:

Tried diagnostics mode - all diagnostics come back ok, even in extended test

Single user mode - tried FSCK to repair, first time it made changes to drive, after that nothing.

Tried safe mode - wont boot

Tried booting from leopard cd - still hangs in same place

tried booting from tiger on an external hdd - at same place it usually hangs, it kernel panics instead

swapped ram out - exactly the same problem when using someone elses ram

Im out of ideas, any help would really be appreciated. Thanks so much in advance and sorry for such a long first post. I am a regular reader or macrumors, just havent been to the forums before.

Many thanks again

hardtofin
 
update:

I have removed the video drivers and caches in single user mode. My computer now boots although has no quartz support and has no 3d acceleration.

I still however can not boot from a CD to put a fresh install of OS X on. Do you guys think this was the fault, just bad files in caches, or could it still be hardware?

any opinions appreciated.

thanks,

hardtofin :)
 
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