Grey Screen of Death

Hi

I have 24inch iMac which was bought in 2006 I think. Anyhow its pretty old but been a beauty.

Today I got the dreaded grey screen of death and it has frozen. I had been downloading files onto my external hard drive. A couple of files would not copy over so I was unable to correctly disconnect the external hard drive. So just pulled it out.

All was still fine until I went back to the computer a few hours later. I was deleting a file then it froze on me.

What I have tried so far.
Reset RAM - I pressed Command, Option, P, R all at the same time when turning the computer on. It does nothing.
I have unplugged the computer for a minute then plugged back in and turn on - nothing.
I have disconnected all devices on the computer so I only have the power point and the keyboard. Turned it on and nothing.

I dont have a start up disc as we have moved house 2 times since buying the computer.

I am desperate and can't find a solution.

TIA

When you say the reset pram does nothing, did it chime twice?

If not I'd suggest trying a USB keyboard to do it.

If it did, you're left with trying to get hold of a replacement OSX disc

"reset pram does nothing".

When I press Command-Option-P-R and press the power button together I get 1 chime then the grey screen. Then when I keep holding the buttons down the screen goes black, chimes once and the grey screen comes up again. If I keep holding the keys down it continues on the above progression.

I will see if I can find another keyboard to see how this works.

I have now tried with another keyboard and still getting the same thing. Any ideas as to what I can do.

You can boot holding D and run the hardware tests. It's unlikely to actually resolve anything but it may highlight a point of failure.

You can try booting holding shift to see if you can get into safe mode. If this works it can take some time. If it does work wait til it's finished loading and reboot from the Apple Menu.

If you still can't boot you'll really need to get an OSX system disc so you can get to disk utility.
In fact even if you do get into the system you'll still want the disc as its bound to need disk repair running.

When I hold the D key down whilst booting up the grey screen comes up and then I get the flashing folder with a question mark.

I can't get into safe mode by holding the shift key down while booting up. Just get the 1 chime then grey screen and nothing more.

How do I get hold of a OSX boot disc? Also this may not help as 5-6 years ago our baby boy decided to put some cash into the cd drive and we have never been able to use it since (and since we use USBs all the time we haven't needed to bother with it).

This did happen a couple of months ago and I finally got it running but can't remember exactly how I did it. Def did not have the boot disc. It was pressing lots and lots and lots of different buttons (hence can't remember which bit I did to get the old girl going again.

Honestly I know we need to get a new computer, we just don't have the cash to get a new mac atm and would much prefer to wait a little longer to save up for it rather than settle on a pc. I just need to get it to work for a little longer (and also get the last lot of home pics of my children off the computer (which I just uploaded it from my camera the day before).

You're going to need to get an OSX disc. Do you know which version of OSX you have?

You're also going to need a external USB DVD drive by the sounds of things.

eBay or borrowing a system disc, maybe even calling apple to pay for a replacement are your disc options.

An external DVD can be picked up cheaply too.

The issue really does sound like a damaged install. The cause is likely a hard disk error but that's just educated conjecture without getting hands on I'm afraid