02-15-2012, 09:30 AM

The imac is about 2 years old, 20" A1244.
It gets as far as making the apple chord in the boot sequence and then does not get past the grey screen.

I have tried to netboot, grey screen
hold down c to boot form a dvd, grey screen
I have tried the option key with a bootable external drive attached.
I have tried safe mode
verbose mode
single user mode

I get nothing. From my limited understanding the apple chord means it has passed basic hardware tests, so if it was just a problem with the hard drive some of the things I tried should have worked no?

Any suggestions would be most welcome. If I have to I will send it in for repair, but it is always a toss up when the repair expense is so high.

Will

02-15-2012, 01:32 PM

The Apple sound (chime, not chord) tells us that the machine passed POST, it does not indicate that the hard drive passed testing. That's an entirely different procedure which must be done using software or the built in Disk Utility.

It does sound like your hard drive may be failing or has already failed. I know you said you tried other ways to boot, however, sometimes a failed internal hard drive will prevent the system from booting even from an external source.

You probably need to make an appointment with your local Apple store and have them check it out. Removing and replacing a hard drive in an iMac is not an easy task and requires some special tools.