iMac blank screen - OS crashed?

[lucore]

Got a new iMac last Thanksgiving - no problems. Last week, when I turned it on, there was nothing but a white screen - no icons, anything. Called APL care and they had me do this, do that and eventually try to reinstall snow leopard off of the install disk. Went OK until it said there's not enough room to install (actually have 463/500 GB free). So called back today, same procedure, but using disk utility. Had me use disk repair, when that's done do it again, then disk repair permission. If that doesn't get it going, he says I might need to erase and reinstall from scratch.
I'm sure someone (not me - I'm not tech savvy) can retrieve all my stuff and back it up before erasing, but I prefer not to do all that if possible.
Any thoughts? Similar episodes? Can I do something else? Do I need to take it to the apple store and talk to someone face to face?
Help please.

Thanks

 

[brairden]

Sounds like a hard drive failure, which means you are going to have to bite the bullet and take this in. There is a chance that disk warrior will save it....but you are, in all likelihood, going to lose your data on that disk. If you know someone that has a mac and an external sata enclosure, you could pull the drive out and check it to see if it is mountable and perhaps get some of your data off of it.

You are not the first "I wish I woulda backed up" story here, and you won't be the last. This, unfortunately, is how most people realize that regular back ups are a necessity. Time Machine makes it simple and painless.

 

[pigoo3]

It sounds to me that your biggest issue is not having enough free space on your hard drive to do the Snow Leopard reinstall. First let me mention that if your iMac has a 500 gig hard drive...that it really doesn't have 500gig of storage space. After formatting...a 500 gig hard drive may only have around 465 gig available for storing things. If your hard drive has 463gig on it...then it only has 2 gigabyte free...not nearly enough to do a Snow Leopard reinstall!

If you have no way of accessing your files on your hard drive, and some of the files are very important...your best bet might be to purchase an external hard drive.

- Install Snow Leopard on the external hard drive
- Boot the Computer from the external hard drive
- move the files you need to save from your almost full internal hard drive to the external hard drive
- erase/reformat the internal hard drive
- install Snow Leopard on the internal hard drive
- move the important files from the external hard drive back onto the internal hard drive
- erase/reformat the external hard drive
- set up "Time Machine" & use the external hard drive as a backup drive

Hopefully this makes sense...and hopefully it helps,

- Nick

 

[brairden]

I took that as he had 463gb free. If he only has 37, I totally agree with you.

 

[vansmith]

After formatting...a 500 gig hard drive may only have around 465 gig available for storing things. If your hard drive has 463gig on it...then it only has 2 gigabyte free...not nearly enough to do a Snow Leopard reinstall!

Remember though that SL measures HD size using base-10 notation so a 500GB HD would appear as 500GB (or just slighty less) . My 320GB is reported as 319.73GB.

To the OP - do you have the exact error message that was reported when you found out that there wasn't enough space?