White Screen... help/advice needed

[theimp]

Hey all. I am having a crisis. My iMac (about 2 years old, its an all white kind), just died today. It froze during iTunes and it wouldn't respond at all. I held the power button and restarted. It gave me a white screen with a folder icon with a question mark in it.

I restarted more times and it sometimes would give an apple logo and load, but end up freezing. Then I tried putting the install disk back in to reformat, and it loaded up, but then when I got to the part where you pick a hard drive, nothing was there.

However, on another try, my computer started up (REALLY SLOWLY), and was fine. I was able to get files I wanted off (phew). Even though everything was there, it definitely seemed like something was wrong.

One other time I tried to put the install disk in, and it DID recognize my hard drive, and during the reinstall of the OS, it stopped and gave a big error log, which I saved, and if I get it turned on again, I can show.

Now it won't start up again. What should I do? Anyone know what this may be? Or how to fix it! Thanks for any help!

 

[IzzyJG99]

Hey all. I am having a crisis. My iMac (about 2 years old, its an all white kind), just died today. It froze during iTunes and it wouldn't respond at all. I held the power button and restarted. It gave me a white screen with a folder icon with a question mark in it.

I restarted more times and it sometimes would give an apple logo and load, but end up freezing. Then I tried putting the install disk back in to reformat, and it loaded up, but then when I got to the part where you pick a hard drive, nothing was there.

However, on another try, my computer started up (REALLY SLOWLY), and was fine. I was able to get files I wanted off (phew). Even though everything was there, it definitely seemed like something was wrong.

One other time I tried to put the install disk in, and it DID recognize my hard drive, and during the reinstall of the OS, it stopped and gave a big error log, which I saved, and if I get it turned on again, I can show.

Now it won't start up again. What should I do? Anyone know what this may be? Or how to fix it! Thanks for any help!

Sounds like your Hard Drive went bad mostly likely. Either that or the I/O controller on the motherboard has gone bad. My iMac a few years ago did this. I popped in a new drive thinking it was a bad drive. It worked for a while, but I later had an Apple Tech in town look at it. Evidently there's a chip on some of the iMacs (Sometimes a seperate board) that controls the In/Out of the ports and drives. It was under warranty at the time, so I can't tell you how much it might cost. If it's a whole Motherboard...it's gonna be like 600 bucks at least.

If you did get applecare...do you have the Hardware Test CD? Run it and it'll test if anything hardware based is wrong. If that won't even boot up then it's a dead Motherboard for sure.