01-18-2011, 04:24 PM

I have an iMac with intel processor running snow leopard. Well it wont boot up pass the grey screen.

I did have a copy of leopard and was able to access the disk untility I am verified and repair the disk. I tried to repair the permissions but it says "The underlying task reported failure on exit.

any ideas??

01-18-2011, 08:09 PM

It sounds like your hard drive may be at fault. See if you can boot the machine with the Snow Leopard DVD and try running Disk Utility to do a Verify and Repair. Post back results.

You say you repaired the hard drive with Leopard? What kind of errors did it find? And did you keep running the verify and repair until all errors were clear?

01-19-2011, 09:00 AM

it only reports errors when i try to repair the disk permissions. The disk verifies and repairs just fine. I am on the search for the snow leopard disk

01-19-2011, 05:33 PM

try starting it in safe mode
To start up into Safe Mode (to Safe Boot), do this:

Be sure the computer is shut down.
Press the power button.
Immediately after you hear the startup tone, hold the Shift key. The Shift key should be held as soon as possible after the startup tone but not before.
Release the Shift key when you see the gray Apple icon and the progress indicator (looks like a spinning gear).

If this does not work you may have to reinstall snow leopard so I suggest you find that disc

Also can you tell us what happened prior to this . Did you delete any files?

01-21-2011, 05:34 PM

This is a really simple possibility, I have this problem all the time, and it's not as complicated as you may think. If you have any flash drives in your Mac, unplug them. Literally that's it. Sometimes the Mac seems to think that some Flash drives are what it needs to boot from, which obviously OS X isn't installed on.

Good luck if it's actually complicated!