iMac (early 2006) - does almost nothing!

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Hey folks!

Working on a friend's iMac and am running into a wall. When power is turned on, it makes the standard noise and the pops up the gray screen. And that's the end of it. Nothing else happens. I have tried the command-option-P-R combo to reset the PRAM...nothing happened. The concern has been that the internal HDD is bad/going bad, and my friend has been using an external IDE HDD. With that plugged in, or without, same thing happens.

The worst part is that, as recently as yesterday, I was able to load the factory restore DVD, reformat and reinstall OS X. It went slowly, but not so slowly that I wanted to cry foul. When I got into the part where you create the user account and it wanted to recognize the keyboard, it froze up. After 20 minutes of waiting for it to do something -other than- freeze up, I powered off with the switch on the back. Since then? Gray screen. No little apple, no spinning-wheel.

Unfortunately, I am kind of new to Macs as a whole, with most of my experience being with my black macbook for school.

Ah yes, I have also removed and reinserted the RAM and tried again. No dice. I have no reached the end of what I know about the machine and have no further, readily available options.

I would greatly appreciate some advice and will offer my heartfelt thanks in advance for any that is subsequently offered. Thanks!

~Blaine
 
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Stop reseting the pram your useing up the battery. The systems all messed up. You need to try to boot from a OS disc, prefer the one for that flavor of Imac. You need to try to reformat the drive and reload the OS. If that fails the drive maybe crashed.
 
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Location
Blue Mountains NSW Australia
Your Mac's Specs
Silver M1 iMac 512/16/8/8 macOS 11.6
Yes the drive sounds very iffish. Try to boot from the install DVD, and go to utilities, and run Repair Disk. Keep us posted on what is reported
 
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Unfortunately, even holding down C(or is it D? The right one) to boot from the DVD does nothing. I may be holding down the key at the wrong time? It still just does a sit and spin. Things spin up, but nothing happens.
 
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It is the C key and hold it down before the chime. The DVD has to be for the Mac model you have or a full retail version or it will not work.
 
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Ok folks, this machine is....comatose. It does not respond, in -any- way to a key press. It will not boot from any drive, internal, external or DVD. I -do- have the correct factory restore discs for OS X.

Here is the full extent of what it will do for me:

1. Press power button
2. 'Bwaum' sound that a Mac makes when it goes to start up
3. Backlit gray screen.
4. End of list.

The keyboard is receiving -power- from the box because it lights up, but it appears to be incapable of influencing the computer in any way.

For my friend, unless the Apple Store does not charge for a diagnostic, having that done is not an option.

What we do have is: An external drive that functions and is more than capable of supporting the system in the event that the internal drive is shot. Replacing the internal drive would be so expensive, by rough estimate from an Apple Store gent that we would be better off throwing it out and getting a new one.

Unfortunately, I have years of experience with PCs, but only about 18 months with Macs, and most of that time has not been fraught with errors or problems that I needed to resolve. Were this a PC, I would have cracked open the case, reset the BIOS and plugged the HDD into another PC to run a disk diagnostic. I wish that were an option here.

Any help or wisdom out there?
 
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Open it up disconnect the hard drive then crank it up and see if you get the flashing ?. No flashing folder with ? ....Really bad news.
 

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