Very slow boot and then only Guest User works

Hello all,

First off, I'm a fairly non-technical user and am asking this question on the Forum because on the weekend, the tech guys that help me out are off and I wanted to check if I could find a solution before MOnday. I tried to find some similar threads and did read something about boot disk, but then some of the other issues involved with other problems were not quite the same, so I'm starting a new thread.

I have this iMac running Mac OS X Lion 10.7.5 - 2, GHz Intel Core i5 - 4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3. Bought it in February - still on guarantee.

It was working fine until yesterday evening and the only thing that was different was that, while my daughter was using the computer, the batteries of the wireless mouse stopped working. She didn't do anything else, as far as she told me.

When I got home I changed the mouse batteries, but as I tried using any of the users that have a password - there are 6 named users at home - the password was accepted, then the screen goes white for a few seconds and returns to the original screen with the user options.

I restarted the computer and that suddenly took many minutes - the little timer doing loops and at the bottom of the almost all white screen, except for the Apple logo in the middle, there is a "loading" type of counter that filled up very slowly. I'd say the whole boot was at least 10 minutes.

Any thoughts or is this one only for the pros?

Thanks to all,
Daniel

The first troubleshooting step you should try is to repair the hard drive. Start the computer using the Recovery partition, and use Disk Utility to repair the drive.
OS X: About OS X Recovery
Resolve startup issues and perform disk maintenance with Disk Utility and fsck

Report back to us the result and also tell us the amount of hard drive free space you have.

GSahli,

I'm so thankful for your quick reply, but also sorry because I did not act on it - I just ended up having much more limited time and access to my computer over the weekend. Given your response, though, and reading a bit on what actions my troubles entail and considering it's now Monday, I will most probably ask for the help of the maintenance team that I'm used to, instead of possibly making some terrible mistake while using the recovery utilities.

I must admit I had hoped this kind of trouble was some bug (I mean, Apple's not perfect, right?) with an easier, known solution... Guess I had hoped wrong this time.

I will report back for sure, one way or the other.

Have a great week,
Daniel

Just to give a feedback - I took to iMac to the shop and they could not recover my HD. Since my computer was still within the guarantee period, I got a new HD. Unfortunately, I did not have everything backed up as expected, so I'm starting many things new. I guess that was my "End of the World" experience on 12/21/2012.

Thanks
Daniel.

Ahh well Daniel as not Mac author David Pogue says "There are two types of computer users. Those that have lost everything having no backup, and those that are about to!" Did the techs install an operating system for you complete with Recovery Mode?