Mac won't boot up; might have made it worse?

Forgive me if I'm in the wrong place, or posted against etiquette.

A while back my iMac started acting funny then one day it wouldn't boot up properly. I think there was a DVD stuck in the drive, but I'm not sure if it was the install disc or another. All it would do is boot up with a white screen and a gray apple logo in the middle.

Well, I put the iMac aside and would come back to it another day when I had some time to deal with it. One day a pulled it back out just to see if something different would happen. And it booted up from the install disc which it never did. I thought all would be ok, but it couldn't reinstall Mac OSX. I was also able to eject the disc, which I wasn't able to previously.

Fast forward a week, I decided to troubleshoot using the internet. I tried all different kinds of things (my memory is fuzzy, should have written this down, I'm not very tech savvy)

Most of this was on forum posts, which I may or may not be able to find again

Booting from the install disc, using disc utility and trying to repair: Nothing

Using terminal and some input command (fsck?): Nothing

Finally, I tried something I read that suggested unmounting the drive, but to be careful because I may not be able to mount it back. I tried it and now I can't mount it back.

So, did I make it worse (I'm sure I did), if so is there anyway to fix it myself?

I do not have an Apple store anywhere around me, so that's not an option.

Any help would be appreciated.

Welcome to the Mac forums.

You didn't give us any info on your iMac. Year, model would help and also which version of OS X you're currently running.

It sounds like from your description that your hard drive may be the problem. If your iMac is still under warranty, it's best to take it to Apple for repair. If it's not and you would like to trouble shoot it yourself, it may require that you remove the hard drive from the machine. Opening up an iMac is a fairly difficult task as it involves removing the display assembly first.

You can see the instructions for removing it at iFixit: The free repair manual.

quagmire pasions

Thanks, chscag,

EMC number: 2114: iMac (17-inch Late 2006) Intel Core 2 Duo using Mac OS X Tiger.

I don't have an Apple store anywhere near me (320 miles to the closest one) and it's no longer under warranty, I checked already.

If it's a hard-drive problem, is it easy to replace?

Thanks!

Thanks for posting back specs.

If it is a hard drive (which it looks like it might be) that's defective, it will have to be swapped out. No, it's not easy. As I mentioned to you in the first reply, the entire display assembly must first be removed so that you can gain access to the inner workings of your iMac.

Go to the web site that I linked and take a look at the instructions for changing out a hard drive on your model iMac. If you don't think that you can successfully do the work or apprehensive about doing it, by all means pay someone to do it for you. Make sure though that you use a repair facility that is authorized to work on Mac machines.