Powered Down during update now grey screen

Hi, I recently bought 3 2nd hand imac's for my husbands new business, all working great as good as my 2012 imac,

he moved office on Saturday and the imac was powered down during a microsoft office (for mac) update

now when i turn it all all i have is grey screen with apple logo and gear

i tried plugging internet straight into back of it and left over night thinking it would update but was still the same the next morning,

i tried holding shift key at start up to start in safe mode but wont do anything different

i tried hoding cmd & r & p and utitiltys comes up offering me option to reinstall os x but when i go ito it it wont load because its only giving recovery disk if you get me

I tried repair disk here too but its coming up with an error and wont repair

any ideas ?

Newtomachav4s said:

he moved office on Saturday and the imac was powered down during a microsoft office (for mac) update

now when i turn it all all i have is grey screen with apple logo and gear

Click to expand...

Yes, because powering down during an update destroyed the directory. Hope you had backups ...

To fix it: if it was running Mountain Lion, you can hold down command + r (just that) and you'll get the Recovery partition. You'll need to reinstall OS X over the net (this will take QUITE a while) and once that's done, probably Microsoft Office.

I don't understand this sentence: "utitiltys comes up offering me option to reinstall os x but when i go ito it it wont load because its only giving recovery disk if you get me" -- you'll need to clarify this a bit more.

If you were running some older version of OS X, you'll need your recovery DVDs that came with the machine, or you'll need to buy a copy of Snow Leopard from Apple for $20 (you have to order by telephone, IIRC). Machines that came with Lion or Mountain Lion originally on them can't use the Snow Leopard DVD. I'm assuming these are at least Intel Macs.

Also, in addition to what chas_m stated, he'll very likely have to reinstall MS Office if the directory structure was destroyed when he powered down. In order to repair the profile and data base that's contained within MS Office it's recommended that it be completely uninstalled and then reinstalled. See these MS instructions on how to uninstall MS Office:

Uninstall Office 2008

Uninstall Office 2011

Thanks guy's had to bring it to my local imac repair shop got it sorted 35 euro thrilled hard drive not gone. Thanks for your help