Morning Mac experts.

Can you help diagnose the problem with my 2009 27inch iMac (apart from its age).

On startup the Apple logo appears along with the progress bar, progress bar fills (very slowly) all the way to the end and then nothing else happens.

I’ve tried starting it up with Command-R held down and also Command-alt-P-R held down, no change to the above.

I’ve unplugged all of the USBs, external hard drive etc.

The above problem came to light last night after watching something on apple tv streamed from iTunes on the iMac. On returning to the iMac the screen was black, although illuminated, but the iMac was unresponsive. I held down the power button to switch it off and when powering it back again the above problem arose.

Any ideas?

Many thanks in advance for all of your help / comments / etc.

IANAME, soz! But 2 thoughts:

is your external hard drive a bootable clone? If so, hold down alt/option key at startup and choose to boot from that disk.

Or, maybe a better first move to try startup in safe mode – hold down shift key at startup then when (if?) it boots to usual system checks to see where problem is, then reboot in usual startup process.

HTH!

Let us know how you get on.

As big Scot but use the recovery partition, boot into that and run the disk utility. After that it can get complicated but a copy of disk warrior will help rebuild directories if the Mac utility gives up the ghost on it.

Cheers guys. I’ll give that a try later when I get back from work. I’ll let you know I get on.

Evening

So, tried the shift key in power up – no change.

The external HDD isn’t a bootable clone – it just has my iTunes library on it.

I do have another HDD with a fairly recent time machine back up on it if that helps.

Also when powering up now the progress bar doesn’t make it all the way to the end before the Mac shuts itself down again.

As a guess sounds like a borked hard drive

You can startup in recovery mode and if necessary make a bootable usb. This will then allow you to look at the harddrive to see if you can get data off. Changing the hardrive in an iMac is a bit tricky as sceen has to come off.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201255

CMD R would be my suggestion

Note its possible the hardrive can be reformatted amd used again fresh with a download of the Operating system from the internet. My daughter did that. However imo if the disk jas had a failure its best to put in an SSD which will be MUCH faster but less capacity

Just had a chat with the local independent repairer. Based on my description of the symptoms he has diagnosed a failing HDD or graphics card. I’m taking it in for him to have a look at on Fri.

He doesn’t charge for the inspection – Just the repair. Fingers crossed it is the hard drive. If so it’ll be getting replaced with a SSD.