imac will start in safe mode but stops at white screen in normal boot

[bawheid]

apologies if this is a bit long winded for a first post but want to provide as much info as possible:-

I recently bought a used white intel imac core 2 duo 24" said to have leopard os x, 3gb ram, 250 gb hd.

in fact it had Lion 10.7.5 installed, so i was very happy with it.

I loaded a few music cd's and it was all running great.

It was, however, lacking iphoto so I installed it from my ilife disk.

I loaded some photos from a cd and from my digital camera. I was able to delete and edit them ok but when i tried to do a slideshow everything froze.

it then wouldn't boot up beyond white screen, but was ok in safe mode. I opened disk utility, verify and repair were ok, did verify and repair permissions, many files needed and were repaired, the exception being a file called SUID something (this file has been changed and cannot be repaired )

I removed all the photos, uninstalled ilife apps and tried again but same as before.

there is less than 30gb used on hd.

any help would be greatly appreciated.

btw, also did verbose, but don't understand the info provided.

Thank You.

 

[harryb2448]

G'day and welcome to the forums.

Try running Lion Recovery over the hard drive. You cannot repair a drive you are booted from and Recovery will do the job better. Keep in mind this is a ten year old computer and the graphics card, with only 256MB of DDR3 memory, may not be up to slide show etc. Just ignore those SUID file reports in Repair Pwermissions.


http://www.macworld.com/article/1161088/mac-apps/hands-on-lion-recovery-mode.html

 

[bawheid]

thanks for prompt reply.

I won't be back home till Tuesday, but will certainly investigate that.

I don't have Lion disk asI bought this from a charity that refurbishes old macs and pc's.

I do have a snow leopard disk which might come in handy in extremis.

i had given some thought to the graphics card as some of the photo files were large-ish.

once again ,thanks

 

[pm-r]

I don't have Lion disk asI bought this from a charity that refurbishes old macs and pc's.

Mac OS X Lion didn't come with a disk installer and you should be able the boot into it's hidden Recovery HD by holding either the command+R or just the option key during a cold boot or Restart.

Disk Utility.app will be one of its Utilities you can run.

PS: If that Mac runs fine in Safe Boot Mode but not normally, then the problem is usually due to goofy non-apple software, not hardware.




- Patrick
======

 

[bawheid]

hello there,

back again and thanks for your advice. Family matters have stopped me getting back to this but, as above, I held option key at startup and saw two icons, one being hd recovery.

clicked on it, but same as before, white screen. I then tried Lion Recovery download but might have got my knickers in a twist opening it up, although feel I may have read somewhere that certain things have to be in place for it to work.
software
I realise now (can't believe I didn't back up before doing anything, but there we are ) that before I even loaded ilife disc I started installing fujifilm software for an x-t1, but felt it was looking for a newer machine than mine, so I aborted it.

then, after the freeze, I started deleting various bits, including windows office, by just dragging them to trash.

the thing is in disk utility i can see a blue area on my hdd and in diskutil list iI can see recovery hd as dev 3 650mb. I also ran fsck in single user mode and got files have been modified, then subsequently all ok ( or whatever) but this is presumably referring to main drive as I am still stuck with being able to open properly only in safe mode, but obviously can't hear my music.

I might look again at Lion recovery download, but we know what they say about people who repeatedly try the same thing hoping for a different out come.

 

[harryb2448]

Think your stars hold a n ew hard drive in your immediate future! You can trey booting from the Snow Leopard disc and running Repair Disk from there, subject to the disc being a full retail DVD and not a silver grey system install disc which will be limited to the model it came with.