Q: My iMac died after attempting a Mavericks upgrade. Store replaced the hard drive - still dead. How can that be?
Two days ago we decided to upgrade our 2010 iMac from Snow Leopard to Mavericks. It didn't work: after the attempt, we couldn't get anything but the gray screen to show. We took it in to a Store, which fortunately had another hard drive in stock. They told us to come back in 48 hours to restore our backed-up data onto the rebuilt system.
Came back today, and the Store told us that even after replacing the hard drive, they couldn't bring up the iMac! "Your machine is dead." We bought a new iMac, loaded the data on it, and took both iMacs back home.
My question is this: How can attempting an upgrade to Mavericks mess up an iMac so badly that it can't be recovered, even by replacing the hard drive? I kept the dead iMac--what else should I try to do to bring it back to life? I don't need to restore any data -- a clean slate would be fine.
iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.5)
Posted on Jun 15, 2014 12:48 PM
Wow, how time flies.
To bring this to closure, here's what I eventually did a few months after the original post: I continued researching possible solutions for a dead iMac, each involving more effort than the last, until I got to "replace the PRAM battery." I went to ifixit.com, followed the simple 35-step procedure (with pictures), and voila! Just 3 hours later, I had replaced the battery, and the system booted up.
So, the problem was not the upgrade to Mavericks, but a hardware issue that was happening at the same time. The solution was to buy a $5 watch battery that took about 30 seconds to pop out and replace. As for why the iMac was constructed so that it took two hours to take apart the entire machine to get to this simple part--that's a topic for another time.
Posted on May 1, 2016 8:48 AM