My iMac is having problems booting. The problem first appeared while listening to music in iTunes, I was in the other room when I came back the music had stopped, and the screen had gone black. At first I assumed it went to sleep, but the usual wake up method of pressing keyboard buttons didn't wake it up so I tried restarting by holding the power button.
Now it won't boot at all, I hear the power come on, and the hard drive and fans spin up, as well as the dvd drive (which now has the restore disc in it as one of my troubleshooting attempts was to try to boot from that disc and restore). But I don't hear the startup chime, and the screen remains black. I have tried resetting the pram, but is seems as though the keyboard is not being recognized , as I have noticed that when I plug the mouse into the keyboard the red laser light on the bottom won't light up, but if I plug it into the computer itself if will.
At this point I'm suspecting it is a hardware failure of somekind but don't know what. Any thoughts.
Also for the details of the machine itself it is a 24" Al iMac 2.8Ghz, 1TB HD, 4GB RAM, OS 10.4.11
Also if it is hardware related and thus requires service do I have to actually call applecare first to get service approved? or can I take it into the local apple approved place, I'm in Ottawa and the new Carbon Computing is pretty close by.
If you have some other RAM available, that would be worth a try too. If you have more than one chip, try one chip at a time. Even though the system is supposed to provide an error tone in the case of a defective memory chip, that won't always happen; I've seen that a couple of times on Intel units.
Try shutting it down (hold down power button for five seconds if no other option is available), unplug the machine, leave it alone for an hour. Plug it back in, let it start up, run your utility tool of choice. If it boots normally and behaves normally, there was a heat issue of some kind (which could be symptomatic of a larger issue, or could just be you have it too close to the wall for it to vent properly).
Thanks for all the helpful suggestions, I took it into Carbon, and they managed to fix it in under a day, it seems simply reseating the ram did the trick. I would of tried that myself, but as mentioned I thought it was supposed to sound a tone if the ram wasn't correctly seated. BTW I was very impressed with Carbon's service, can't wait till they have a full grand opening for the new Ottawa store.
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