Late 2013 Imac does not boot

LennyD · March 8, 2023

Hello. A friend of mine owns a Late 2013 intel CPU based Imac and he has been encountering some problems with the booting process.

Whenever he tries turning it on he gets a black screen with the apple logo and a loading bar that gets stuck around 75% all the time.

Whenever he tries the command+r while turning it on it leads him to a screen where he can chose his boot drive and also select a wireless connection.

There is another shortcut that makes the imac go to a screen where there's a rotating Earth and he has to pick a wireless connection, from what i understood this option tries reinstalling a new version of the OS in order to make the imac boot.

This is where it gets weird, he tried the last thing a couple of times most of the times it started downloading showing that it has 7/6 minutes left and then it rebooted to the black screen apple logo stuck at 75% loading and then when he tried tit again he got a rotating earth for around 10 minutes with no progress bar or timer, then the imac showed a white screen wtih the apple logo on it and after a couple of minutes the imac played a voice clip that said "to use english press the return key". He tried pressing it but nothing happened.

He tried resetting the NVRAM and the SMC. Before in between takes.

It is worth mentioning that he usually works on gpu intensive projects and right before this issue he encountered some graphical issues and artifacts.

The plan for now is to make a bootable usb drive with a running os on it and try to boot from it, this will happen in around 12 hours and im looking for any suggestions and opinions.

mr cheese · March 8, 2023

Could very well be a bad drive, wouldn't surprise me if that was the case since it's happening after reboot. You'll know more if you can successfully boot off an Ubuntu stick because that will rule out most of your issues regarding RAM, CPU, GPU and such. Worst case, if SMART data comes back clean, you might need a complete wipe of the system and reinstall from there. Great time for an SSD in this old beast of a PC!

LennyD · March 14, 2023

Apparently the GPU was fried, managed to get the data from the hard drive. If anyone stumbles on this thread and has the same problems as specified a fried GPU might be the issue.