iMac Yosemite boot problem

Everskyward

Everskyward

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Everskyward
What does this mean? Probably nothing good.

7cffc148bf609779ce74af84466e3b22.jpg


Doesn't boot into safe mode or recovery mode.
 
Ummm...I'm thinking you're correct. I'd suspect a failing/failed hard drive. In other words, it suck. :-(
 
A couple days ago it seemed like it was slowing down, sometimes freezing with lots of beach balls. Then it would only boot into recovery mode. The disk had many faults. The Apple guys talked me through wiping the disk and reinstalling the OS. After that the disk verified as OK. I restored my backup yesterday. Today after waking it up from sleep it was doing it again. Now it doesn't boot at all.
 
game over, insert new hard drive and try again. :(
 
Now it's in an endless loop trying to boot and says this at times.

aa305ac274ab2aca6d365d7a970cd6c5.jpg
 
it really isn't happy
 
You may want to try doing an "Internet Recovery." It'll let you know if your disk drive(s) is(are) bad, or if it's something worse. (Your second screenshot makes me thing it may have already tried this by itself, and failed...)

HT201314 - "OS X: About OS X Recovery"
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314
 
Command + R worked a few days ago which was how I managed to restore it the first time but does not work now. It ends up trying to boot over and over and over in an endless cycle.
 
steingar said:
Time for a new hard drive. You did back up all your data, right?
Click to expand...
Yup. I guess I haven't made it clear that I was able to reformat the hard drive and reinstall everything before it failed again the next day. I'm not sure how I was able to reformat and recover the first time unless the drive progressively got worse and worse.
 
btw - if your iMac has a solid-state drive, then once failures start happening a rapid degradation isn't completely out of the realm of possibilities.

If your iMac has a rotating hard disk, then nevermind.
 
Bob Noel said:
btw - if your iMac has a solid-state drive, then once failures start happening a rapid degradation isn't completely out of the realm of possibilities.

If your iMac has a rotating hard disk, then nevermind.
Click to expand...
It has a rotating hard disk. It's a mid 2011.
 
The iMac is back from the hospital with a new hard drive. I'm typing on it now. Wondering about people's opinions on how I should restore. I have a full Time Machine backup but I'm wondering if it's better to restore the whole image or use Migration Assistant to restore individual programs and settings, etc. I'm leaning toward Migration Assistant but will listen to input.
 
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