Bluetooth: Not available

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:Confused: Hi… I have an iMac 27” 3.1 GHz Intel Core i5, running OSX 10.9.4.
The other night I shut my computer down as normal with no issues. The next morning when I booted it took probably 10 minutes before the grey Apple appeared and then another minute or so before the spinning wheel. When I finally had the screen up and running I discovered my mouse trackpad no longer worked. And then discovered that my Bluetooth was ‘not available’.
I spent an entire day trying to troubleshoot to see if I could fix the problem myself but after reading screeds of information online and trying every solution to no avail, I am not sure where to turn next. I have had the computer for nearly 3 years and no extended warranty. I am loathe to take it in as I would then be without a computer and no doubt would end up paying half the cost of buying a new machine in having this one fixed.
So, below is the list of things I have tried… and as yet nothing has made a difference. The mac is booting slightly faster but still takes a good 5 minutes from boot to go and the Bluetooth is still ‘Not available’… Please help me
1. Deleted the com.apple.bluetooth.plist file (library preferences) and shut down, waited and rebooted
2. Did a PRAM reset
3. Reset the SMC
4. Repaired Permissions with disk utility
5. Reinstalled from Time Machine
6. Clean installed Mavericks (erased computer and started from scratch with Mavericks installer on a USB drive - then used my backup drive to reinstall my files)
7. Checked System Information for Bluetooth, it says ‘No information found’
If nothing else works, my next question would be, can anyone recommend a good Bluetooth dongle that would work on an iMac 27” 3.1 GHz Intel Core i5, running OSX 10.9.4?
 

bobtomay

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15" MBP '06 2.33 C2D 4GB 10.7; 13" MBA '14 1.8 i7 8GB 10.11; 21" iMac '13 2.9 i5 8GB 10.11; 6S
You're troubleshooting the wrong thing if it's literally taking 5 minutes to boot up - the top 2 reasons:

A) your drive is too full - how much used and free space is there?
B) the hard drive is dying - no amount of troubleshooting is going to take care of it - need a new drive

I would suggest you backup the drive NOW if you don't already have it backed up.

If you have over 20% free space on the drive...
After you back up the drive
Boot to the recovery partition (boot while holding down the Command key and the R key)
Go to Disk Utility - select the drive on the left - then try a Verify Drive - if it comes back with any errors then try the Repair Drive (not a permissions repair).

edit:
Do you have an external bootable clone - if you boot to that do you still have the same problems?
 
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chscag

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I agree with bobtomay. I had the same symptom on my older iMac (2011 21.5") and it turned out to be a defective hard drive. The iMacs from that era used Seagate drives which were failing at a higher than normal rate. When Apple replaced mine, they replaced it with a Western Digital model. And, depending on which Apple store you take it to, it won't take long to replace the drive. They replaced mine the same day.
 
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Thanks bobtomay... I have a 1TB hard drive with 642GB free so it's not even half full. I am backed up regularly so loss of info isn't an issue.
I tried booting to the recovery partition as you suggested but all that achieved was me sitting in front of a black screen for 7 minutes (I timed it) and then giving up. When I rebooted, the screen again came up almost black but then a faint apple appeared in the background and then my desktop arrived in full colour and at full brightness. Very strange. So anyway, was unable to boot into Recovery mode.
Don't know what a bootable clone is sorry. I use time machine for backup.
 
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A bootable clone would have been if you used CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper to back up. Each makes a bootable copy on your external hard drive. Agree you hard drive is on the way out. If under warranty off to the Apple Store or Genius Bar.
 
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So if my hard drive is on the way out... and I have it replaced... do you think my bluetooth function will just reappear again?
 

chscag

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So if my hard drive is on the way out... and I have it replaced... do you think my bluetooth function will just reappear again?

Probably not. The hard drive does appear to be failing but should not have anything to do with bluetooth. As far as getting the hard drive replaced by Apple, they normally should be able to do that the same day you take it in. Of course that depends on how busy they are.

If you take your iMac in to Apple, ask them to run diagnostics and mention the bluetooth problem. Here in the US, replacing a 1 TB hard drive in an iMac will normally cost around $400.00 which would include the drive and labor.
 

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