iMac won't boot - different from other thread

Hi all-

New member - long time Mac user. A person in our graphics dept. has an iMac running OS 10.4. She told me that she recently deleted some items from the system folder (she thinks) and now it only makes it to the spinning dial when powering up. Just sits there with the spinning dial.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

Razorbike said:

Hi all-

New member - long time Mac user. A person in our graphics dept. has an iMac running OS 10.4. She told me that she recently deleted some items from the system folder (she thinks) and now it only makes it to the spinning dial when powering up. Just sits there with the spinning dial.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

Click to expand...

Perhaps start by trying to boot from the OS disk and go from there.

Razorbike said:

New member - long time Mac user. A person in our graphics dept. has an iMac running OS 10.4. She told me that she recently deleted some items from the system folder (she thinks) and now it only makes it to the spinning dial when powering up. Just sits there with the spinning dial. Any suggestions? Thanks

Click to expand...

Welcome to the Mac Forums.

As has already been suggested, have her try booting from the original install media that came with the machine. After it boots, run verify and also repair permissions from Disk Utility.

However, if she in fact deleted files from the system folder, it's likely that she is going to have to reinstall OS X from the install disks that came with the machine.

Thanks for the quick responses. I'll try what both of you suggested. Looks like you have a really cool forum here. We'll be using this site as a reference in the future.

Thanks again for your help,

RB Dave

It would help if you tell us which iMac it is.

She DOES have backups, RIGHT?!?!? ;D

I advocate this generally, but especially for that kind of situation I think it is way best to reformat the hard drive and do a completely clean install. (In this case, I seem to recall you can't install the new OS over the damaged OS, or at least it's not a good idea).

Depending on the machine, she might as well upgrade to a newer OS version. That should run faster and save hard drive space, if the machine will support it (must be Intel for Snow Leopard).