Hi,

My brother is having problems with his iMac, see when ever he want to start the coomputer, it just gets stuck on the blue screen, and if he lives the iMac sitting there for 30 min or so then finally a black screen shows, asking for a username and password, However if he tryes to enter his login and pass. it says incorect.

So what can he do?
How about booting from a cd? and how do you boot from a cd? or is there anything eles he can do?

Thank you

What type of iMac?

If you want to boot from a CD, hold down the "Option" Button, during startup, until icons appear asking you where you want to boot from.

I got a iMac Intel Core 2 Duo 1.83GHz Computer.
See I tried to boot from a CD, but it is not working.

It gets stuck on the gray screen....

Is there anythin else I could try???????

Reset the PRAM (google for it )

I've just reied that, however still won't work.
I managed to boot from the cd it all goes fuine until it askes me to which drive do you want to install OSX, the problem is that it doesn't show any drives.

Could it bee the hard drive??

Try loading up Disk Utility when you boot from the CD and if possible format your Mac partition. It probably is not the harddrive, as it would have given you a kernel panic at the start only.

Disconnect the computer from the mains supply for 30 seconds then reconnect and start up again. If that fails try the Apple Hrdware Test, is's available on Mac OS X install Disc 1

To run it start the machine with the Disc in while holding down the D key.

Make sure any external devices are unplugged prior to running the Apple Hardware Test program (except keyboard and mouse).

If the program displays any errors make a note of them and investigate your apple support options.

Ok, Somehow I've managed to boot it, so I reformatted the HD and reinstalled OSX, However now I keep getting a S.M.A.R.T. Failing
When ever I run Disk Utility.


So what could be wrong???


Thank you

Your harddrive is F*cked, replace it.

S.M.A.R.T. is there to tell you when the harddrive is about to break, when the drive does heavily error correction on data reads/writes. in practice, it doesn't work. usually when you get the message, it's too late.

Regards, Per.



Your harddrive is F*cked, replace it.

S.M.A.R.T. is there to tell you when the harddrive is about to break, when the drive does heavily error correction on data reads/writes. in practice, it doesn't work. usually when you get the message, it's too late.

Regards, Per.

Yep, time to take your bro's iMac to an Apple Store. Hopefully it's still under warranty, cause it's over $400 to get it replaced without one.

I'll be nice and point you right to Apple's store locator: http://www.apple.com/retail/
Find the store and go to its page, look at the gray box that says "Apple Store Concierge", and click the link that says "Make a reservation". I recently had the HD in my mac go bad, so I know how this all works...