iMac won't boot

[userman]

Hi everyone! I have tried everything to get this iMac to boot up to no avail. I tried Safe mode, recovery mode, booting from OS X disk and even Verbose mode. I get the message "The volume Macintosh HD appears to be OK". The is no recovery HD only the HD and disk utility will not start. I know you guys can HELP! Thanks.

 

[chas_m]

We can't be of much help until you give us some information about the iMac you are talking about, such as year, model, processor speed, RAM, OS X version you (were) running, and as much other detail as you can think of.

I'm guessing this is an old iMac with an old OS version on it, and a now dead hard drive. Hopefully its not so old you didn't have Time Machine to fall back on -- because if so, you're up a creek.

 

[johnodd4]

??? weird no recovery mean's snow leopard leopard or tiger maybe??

Because mountain lion lion and maverick create a recovery partition.

 

[userman]

RAM is 4GB kit (2GBx2) DDR2 PC2-5300. Yes, it's an older iMac OS is prolly Leopard. Have to get to the desktop to be sure. I ran fsck_hfs -y -rc -d /dev/disk0s2 in single mode and got "...repaired successfully.FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED". only it won't logout.

 

[chas_m]

If the OP was running Lion or later, then they might (depending on how they installed it) have a recovery partition, but his first post suggests that either a pirated copy of OS X was installed (no recovery partition) or that the OS was too old to have a recovery partition (Snow Leopard or earlier).

The hard drive doesn't appear to be completely dead as I first thought, but clearly it won't boot and the OP apparently doesn't have either a DVD of the operating system, a bootable backup (always a good idea) on an external HD or a bootable USB thumb drive with his more-recent download-only OS X version available.

 

[userman]

If the OP was running Lion or later, then they might (depending on how they installed it) have a recovery partition, but his first post suggests that either a pirated copy of OS X was installed (no recovery partition) or that the OS was too old to have a recovery partition (Snow Leopard or earlier).

The hard drive doesn't appear to be completely dead as I first thought, but clearly it won't boot and the OP apparently doesn't have either a DVD of the operating system, a bootable backup (always a good idea) on an external HD or a bootable USB thumb drive with his more-recent download-only OS X version available.

Well, that's good news. No, it's not pirated. Pretty sure it's Leopard as you said. Don't have the original OS DVD so we're looking at thumb driving it. Keep em coming.

 

[chas_m]

Snow Leopard (10.6) and Leopard (10.5) and earlier don't have recovery partitions.

If it's an Intel-based Mac, order a copy of the Snow Leopard DVD from Apple for $20 and boot from that when it arrives. If its a G5/G4/etc then recovery is going to be a much more difficult business.

Your HD is still communicating, which is good news, but the directory of the disk may be corrupted. I would normally suggest DiskWarrior to fix this issue but it's $100+ so without being certain it can fix the issue I can't suggest you buy it.

 

[userman]

Hi gang,

I retrieved the OS X disks (10.4.10) and it's up and running. I'll upgrade soon as the new OS X DVD arrives. Thanks for all your help! Merry Christmas