Old iMac Crash

Roby · April 24, 2014

Hey LTT,

I have an old 2006 20-inch iMac that I'm pretty sure I messed up. I've taken it to an Apple store twice but since they consider it a vintage model, they won't repair it. They told me what they thought might be wrong with it, and I went ahead and tried the repair myself at home but am still having no luck. So, I figure who better to collaborate with than LTT Here's the story:

Since getting a new laptop, I decided I wanted throw a linux distro on the iMac as 10.6 was making it pretty sluggish. I burned a few live DVD's to try, and I popped them in, booted up a number of times to try them all out. I ended up downloading some GRUB bootloader thinking maybe I would just dual-boot (which I don't care to do now). After loading up a couple more of the live DVD's, my iMac decided not to move past the white screen during boot. I tried restarting it, ejecting the DVD (which is still to this day stuck in there) but have had 0 luck.

The Apple store suggested it might be a corrupted HDD (which, with my still knowledge of computers, made sense. So, I went out and bought a WD HDD, opened up the iMac and installed it. Still having the same issue. None of the key combinations at boot get me anywhere either. It's stuck on that white screen after it makes the boot noise.

If anyone has any ideas that I could try that would be awesome. It's not the end of the world because I now have a newer laptop and put linux on the other laptop that I got after the iMac.

Thanks!

ShadowCaptain · April 24, 2014

@Roby

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC573Z/A/mac-os-x-106-snow-leopard

I believe to reinstall OSX you will need to get hold of the 10.6 disc or usb stick (make a usb recovery perhaps)

you can then boot from the recovery disc/usb formate your drive and reinstall the OS

found this for the ubuntu boot

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Intel_iMac

Roby · April 24, 2014

@Roby

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC573Z/A/mac-os-x-106-snow-leopard

I believe to reinstall OSX you will need to get hold of the 10.6 disc or usb stick (make a usb recovery perhaps)

you can then boot from the recovery disc/usb formate your drive and reinstall the OS

found this for the ubuntu boot

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Intel_iMac

Thanks for the reply. I'll check out the Ubuntu link.

Only problem is I can't get the system to boot into anything. The Apple store tried booting OS X from their network and that didn't work either. This leads me to believe there is a hardware issue somewhere else other than the HDD, but I have no clue where to start looking.