Anybody good with Macs?

[Pudgey51]

So I bought my iMac back in September 2008. Worked flawlessly for years, survived three big moves, kept on ticking. Streamed the Super Bowl in 2012, wouldn't shut down. Shut it down the wrong way (i know stupid) and then it wouldn't start up again. Was told the hard drive was fried (?) had it replaced, 2 years later, same problem, won't start up, grey screen spinning wheel. Apple Store says the hard drive(or something relating to it) is shot. The computer is too old to get parts from Apple so I'm holding onto it hoping I can someone pull all my files off.

My question is, should I worry that something contained within my files is the cause for the problem and should be hesitant of trying to port over my files to a new device? Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance!

[going_home]

Big Macs and Thick Burgers......

[smilestyler]

Do you have anything in iCloud? There should be nothing malicious in there that would go onto your new device.

What do the folks at apple suggest?

[Pudgey51]

I don't use the cloud, unfortunately. The folks at Apple suggested a new hard drive and porting over any files that can be salvaged but didn't say whether it was virus caused or defect caused

[Bxmarg]

A while a go the hard drive on my iMac went bad. There was a power outage and I afterwards it would mount But then a few days or sometimes hours latter would freeze up. Anyways I replaced the hard drive and used time machine to put things back in order.

But it sounds like a hardware issue. So first try running disk repair (in the applications\utilities folder). Then repair your permissions (also done from disk repair).

Other thing to try is see if you have a memory leak. Fire up activity monitor (also utilities folder) and see if anything is slowly draining your memory to zip.

[Pudgey51]

A while a go the hard drive on my iMac went bad. There was a power outage and I afterwards it would mount But then a few days or sometimes hours latter would freeze up. Anyways I replaced the hard drive and used time machine to put things back in order.

But it sounds like a hardware issue. So first try running disk repair (in the applications\utilities folder). Then repair your permissions (also done from disk repair).

Other thing to try is see if you have a memory leak. Fire up activity monitor (also utilities folder) and see if anything is slowly draining your memory to zip.

Can't start up the computer, anytime I do I get a grey screen with a spinning circle of grey-white lines. I even tried the start up holding down command or whatever and got nothing. Apple Genius Bar tried doing the same thing and that's where they got the harddrive hardware issue. Could not get anything to open on the Mac....

[phy]

I have to agree with the others and say it sounds hardware related. Malware for mac is pretty uncommon and when it does pop up it's usually designed to steal information, not destroy your computer. If you have the os install disk that came with it you should be able to boot from that to get into the recovery partition, provided your optical drive still works. From there you can try to read the disk to see if you'll be able to recover any data and access disk utility to try to repair the disk. It's been a while since I've been in one of those imacs but there not that hard to work on. The glass is held down by magnets and you'll need a pair of suction cups to pull it off. Just pull evenly on both sides and you should be fine. ifixit has lots off good information on repairing macs https://www.ifixit.com/. Repairs at the apple store can be expensive. In my opinion 5 years is a good run for a computer (at work we swap ours out after 3 but my personal mac is pushing 6) and I'd say you got your money out of it now that it's going on 7. If you feel confident swapping the drive by all means go for it. Spinning disks are cheap right now, if you don't need lots of space a ssd would give a nice performance boost.

Andy

[Pudgey51]

I have to agree with the others and say it sounds hardware related. Malware for mac is pretty uncommon and when it does pop up it's usually designed to steal information, not destroy your computer. If you have the os install disk that came with it you should be able to boot from that to get into the recovery partition, provided your optical drive still works. From there you can try to read the disk to see if you'll be able to recover any data and access disk utility to try to repair the disk. It's been a while since I've been in one of those imacs but there not that hard to work on. The glass is held down by magnets and you'll need a pair of suction cups to pull it off. Just pull evenly on both sides and you should be fine. ifixit has lots off good information on repairing macs https://www.ifixit.com/. Repairs at the apple store can be expensive. In my opinion 5 years is a good run for a computer (at work we swap ours out after 3 but my personal mac is pushing 6) and I'd say you got your money out of it now that it's going on 7. If you feel confident swapping the drive by all means go for it. Spinning disks are cheap right now, if you don't need lots of space a ssd would give a nice performance boost.

Andy

Thanks, I'll check out that link later when I get home. And yeah, I feel I definitely got my money's worth out of it, it had a good run. Thank you everyone, I feel more confident pulling the files off that I need.

[zulubravo44]

I had a really similar experience a while ago on a newer MacBook Pro. I couldn't get the damn thing to start up no matter what I did. It would sometimes change to a blinking question mark when booting.

Long story short, I took out the old hard drive and dropped in a new one (one of the new fangled solid state drives). I went through the process of reinstalling the OS and whatnot. Then I plugged my old hard drive in with an external disk enclosure and voila, all my files were intact except certain filetypes. All my music, pictures and most of my documents (except Keynote files and some others) were fully accessible.

I'd recommend this as an approach if you can justify picking up a new 2.5" hard drive and an enclosure. If nothing else, you have a functioning computer. Then work backwords with things like DataRescue 3 (I've had good results with this one) or other data recovery programs.

[JonM]

I had a really similar experience a while ago on a newer MacBook Pro. I couldn't get the damn thing to start up no matter what I did. It would sometimes change to a blinking question mark when booting.

Long story short, I took out the old hard drive and dropped in a new one (one of the new fangled solid state drives). I went through the process of reinstalling the OS and whatnot. Then I plugged my old hard drive in with an external disk enclosure and voila, all my files were intact except certain filetypes. All my music, pictures and most of my documents (except Keynote files and some others) were fully accessible.

I'd recommend this as an approach if you can justify picking up a new 2.5" hard drive and an enclosure. If nothing else, you have a functioning computer. Then work backwords with things like DataRescue 3 (I've had good results with this one) or other data recovery programs.

Once you have your data recovered, an external drive would also be useful for Time Machine backups. This way, if your hard drive goes out again, at least you have it to fall back on.

[Bxmarg]

Hey if you have a recovery disk (should have come with your Mac because it sounds like you have a pre lion Mac) you could try booting up from that and then run repair from the recovery disk. I missed the part where you couldn't actually get passed the gray screen. But that's what I did when my drive went. I was able to get it working but not for long. You may be able to get some files off that way.

5 years is a good run. I'm coming up in 8 on my iMac but that's was after the new drive. The fan is almost dead.