Culprit: iMac 20" Early 2006. Apple Care expired this year 
OS: Snow Leopard Bootcamp Win 7, Ubuntu 9.10.
Problem: I felt I would be nice to the iMac and shut it down after a hard days work. I woke up the next morning, turned it on, and it loads up past the gray screen, then goes to the dark blue snow leopard screen. From there I DO NOT get a mouse pointer. I get zip, zilch, nothing.
I have let it sit over night just to make sure it wouldn't surprise me.
Remedies tried:
Booting to safe mode. Boots fine but when it gets to the blue screen it doesn't do anything else.
Booting to single user mode. From there I renamed the com.apple.loginwindow and the com.apple.startup file. Didn't do anything.
Resetting PRAM, VRAM, ram, jingle bell, any key, * key, I've tried resetting everything possible and not possible. WHY computer gods? WHY?
Tried to boot the hardware test (D) but it never did anything.
Boot via verbose and it boots just fine, and doesn't throw any errors before going to said blue screen.
Tried booting from snow leopard disk, loads fine. When it gets to blue screen it doesn't go any farther.
I hooked it up via target disk mode to my macbook pro and copied all the files off the drive that I might need. I then put the snow leopard disk in the mbp and installed snow leopard back to the drive. Rebooted. Same problem.
Do you need to format the drive w/ disk utility before re-installing osx? If so I'm going to lose the bootcamp partition and could inevitably end up with nothing working.
Here's what I learned from google:
It's probably a bad hard drive - yeahhhh. I get to spend 6 hours taking this damn thing apart.
It could be the hard drive fan has died thus over heating it.
If you have an older iMac and one of those new silver shiny keyboards. It doesn't do **** at start up, so you could waste an hour of your day envisioning the death of said silver keyboard. Only to find out you have to use the original. Really Apple? Really?
Thanks for the help macrumors.
Any gurus out have any other ideas I could try?
OS: Snow Leopard Bootcamp Win 7, Ubuntu 9.10.
Problem: I felt I would be nice to the iMac and shut it down after a hard days work. I woke up the next morning, turned it on, and it loads up past the gray screen, then goes to the dark blue snow leopard screen. From there I DO NOT get a mouse pointer. I get zip, zilch, nothing.
I have let it sit over night just to make sure it wouldn't surprise me.
Remedies tried:
Booting to safe mode. Boots fine but when it gets to the blue screen it doesn't do anything else.
Booting to single user mode. From there I renamed the com.apple.loginwindow and the com.apple.startup file. Didn't do anything.
Resetting PRAM, VRAM, ram, jingle bell, any key, * key, I've tried resetting everything possible and not possible. WHY computer gods? WHY?
Tried to boot the hardware test (D) but it never did anything.
Boot via verbose and it boots just fine, and doesn't throw any errors before going to said blue screen.
Tried booting from snow leopard disk, loads fine. When it gets to blue screen it doesn't go any farther.
I hooked it up via target disk mode to my macbook pro and copied all the files off the drive that I might need. I then put the snow leopard disk in the mbp and installed snow leopard back to the drive. Rebooted. Same problem.
Do you need to format the drive w/ disk utility before re-installing osx? If so I'm going to lose the bootcamp partition and could inevitably end up with nothing working.
Here's what I learned from google:
It's probably a bad hard drive - yeahhhh. I get to spend 6 hours taking this damn thing apart.
It could be the hard drive fan has died thus over heating it.
If you have an older iMac and one of those new silver shiny keyboards. It doesn't do **** at start up, so you could waste an hour of your day envisioning the death of said silver keyboard. Only to find out you have to use the original. Really Apple? Really?
Thanks for the help macrumors.
Any gurus out have any other ideas I could try?
