Help! - iMac Problem

Scubadevils

Hi All,

I have an iMac which is about 3 years old. It has been pretty slow for the last few months which I hadn't figured out why. It started to download some updates on Sunday (usual such as Security, iTunes etc) - I was going away for a couple of days so I left it to download and restart. I got back tonight to find that iTunes was not closed so prevented the updates from running. It was really slow and eventually froze altogether and I had to power it off by holding the power button for a few seconds. When I turned it back on, the grey screen came on with the little circle icon, then after a couple of minutes the screen went blue and remained that way

I have switched it on and off again a few times to no avail. Any suggestions please? Part of me wants the excuse to buy a new one, but the recession tells me otherwise Anywhere to repair these if I can't solve myself? Oh, and I can't find the discs that came with it either.

Thanks

Ham'nd'egger

Felixdhc wrote: »

Hi All,

I have an iMac which is about 3 years old. It has been pretty slow for the last few months which I hadn't figured out why. It started to download some updates on Sunday (usual such as Security, iTunes etc) - I was going away for a couple of days so I left it to download and restart. I got back tonight to find that iTunes was not closed so prevented the updates from running. It was really slow and eventually froze altogether and I had to power it off by holding the power button for a few seconds. When I turned it back on, the grey screen came on with the little circle icon, then after a couple of minutes the screen went blue and remained that way

I have switched it on and off again a few times to no avail. Any suggestions please? Part of me wants the excuse to buy a new one, but the recession tells me otherwise Anywhere to repair these if I can't solve myself? Oh, and I can't find the discs that came with it either.

Thanks

Try this for a starter. Given your iMacs age, it sounds as if this is relevant to you.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2831?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

nialler

restart it again holding

cmd (apple key) and s together

this boots into single user mode once it's finished doing all the white type on the black screen type the following

/sbin/fsck -f or sbin/fsck -f (can't remember if you need the first slash think you do).

This will go through the file consistency check, if it tells you the system has been modified, hit up arrow on your keyboard and run it again (the same command comes up when you hit the up arrow).

When it says that the file system appears to be ok type reboot

When restarting hold down the shift key until your machine boots to the login screen and will say "Safe Boot" enter username and password then restart the iMac, hopefully everything will be fine then.

If your mac boots up try and establish how much free space you have on your HD and clean up if possible.

If all else fails, DiskWarrior is quite good for getting a mac back on it's feet.


Niall

Diarmuid

Something like this happened to a friend . We went through all the procedures recommended on the Apple site to get it up and running but to no avail. In the end he had to do an Archive and Install procedure with his install disks. (don't forget to preserve users). That worked fine and he then did a Software Update (a big one) and it was all back working again.

BTW I have an iMacG5 from 2005 and it's still running fine. I did an upgrade to Leopard a few weeks ago and no problems. Did you look at your process table to see what was hogging the cpu/memory?