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Stuck at Apple logo, spinning wheel

N

Nickp7777

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 29, 2011
5
0
Hey everyone,

My iMac froze yesterday and I switched it off by holding down the power button. After that it freezes during bootup on the apple logo and the spinning wheel.
I ran disk utility and it said that it cannot be fixed so restored everything from a time machine backup.
Didn't help

I've tried safe mode, pram reset, repair disk says it's ok

Verbose mode stopped with

Setfixedspeed logic error speed any?


Can anyone help me?

Thanks!
 
Sounds like your hard drive is the culprit. Appears to be ready to take a dump.
 
I've seen this on a client's computer once before. I replaced the hard drive with a new one and the computer booted normally. After running SpinRite on the original hard drive, it had many bad sectors.

You could try zapping PRAM (hold control+option+P+R after the chime at startup), but I doubt that will do anything. This looks all too familiar...
 
I have win 7 and I can still boot into it from the look of it I could access the files in the Mac partition. Does that tell you anything?

Thanks
 
Can you boot in single user mode (Hold cmd+s after the startup chime) and type fsck -y? Maybe it will say something.

Have you tried booting from a cd? (The one that came with your mac.) If you insert it and press "d" during startup, the cd can do a hardware check.
 
You could try booting to the OS X installation CD and using Disk Utility to repair the boot drive, although, it sounds like you may have done that already?

Bear in mind that using Disk Utility from the boot hard disk won't work. It has to be run from some other boot media.
 
I had the same "spinning wheel of death" as I read it is called.
After talking to apple for awhile an erase and install is what ended up fixing mine.
 
Thanks for all your replies.

I have tried booting from cd and did a repair.

I have tried single user mode

I have tried recovering from time machine backup


---

Now I'm thinking maybe I need to do a fresh install of osx.

If I do this is it possible to recover all my files from time machine?

Is this safe? Do I lose anything with this method?



Thanks!
 
Sorry, Ive never used Time Machine, always just back up my files.

When I got the spinning wheel I hadnt backed anything up. Almost lost two years of travel photos and my music collection. But Apple told me I could access my computers hard drive using a friends mac with a usb. So thats what I did (before the erase/install of course). I was able to copy my Home folder to his macbook. Saved!

I assume Time Machine will have you covered (thats what its for right??) but if not this is always an option.
 
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