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Our old 27” desktop Mac is acting strangely.
It is turning on to a pink screen. Startup noises sounded normal but it has a gray Apple logo.
If/when it completes the status bar it goes to a blank white screen and does nothing more. If it doesn’t complete the status bar sometimes it reboots.
I have so far been unable to get it to boot to recovery or safe mode.
I’ve been letting my kids use this computer to watch movies while my Dad watched them as I have been in and out of town for several weeks. My daughter also uses it daily for a homeschool program.
Before I left about a month ago, I noticed it had a sleep timer that seemed to be set and I couldn’t figure out how to turn it off. During my last trip (3 weeks ago), my Dad reported that it had shut down randomly, but restarted fine and it didn’t give me any issues when I was home for a week.
This is last week my Dad reported what it is doing now.
I found serial number this morning. It is a mid 2011 model 27” iMac.
I ran Verbose mode ok as well. Not sure if it matters but after being unplugged and powered off all night it was blue when I initially tried to start it up.
Screenshots attached. It has not moved past waiting for DSMOS in about 10 mins.
My goal here is to determine what the issue is and the cost if it would be possible to repair. I’m not in the position financially to purchase what we need to replace this as a setup for school/movies for the kids right now but could throw a few hundred at it if it’s an easily fixable issue to get me to the point where I can replace it.
I’m not sure if there is anything I need on there as I recall doing a backup (and have an external hard drive labeled as such) when I began letting them use it and moved to using my MacBook primarily. With our constant travels it has no doubt taken a beating - including a fall that cracked the screen during a trip to Alaska in 2017.
[Image Edited by Moderator to Remove Personal Information]
I am guessing this is not a "27” Mac Pro desktop" nor a "27” desktop Mac"
From the glimpse in the bottom photo it appears to be a 27" iMac of some unknown vintage. Maybe mid 2011?
Looks like your graphics card may have gone, but there are other potential hardware issues all of which add up to your Mac is probably toast and financially unrepairable. The cost of repairs being greater than the value of the model.
Were you trying to recover your hard drive?
I know you said you couldn't get into Recovery Mode, but have you tried Internet Recovery Mode? (either OPTION-COMMAND-R or SHIFT-OPTION-COMMAND-R)
What about Diagnostics mode (hold down D at startup).
You can also take a look at Verbose mode (COMMAND-V) which should show a bunch of text. A camera picture of the end of the text posted here as a reply would be really helpful.
Can you pull up the Serial Number off the back of the iMac or bottom of the stand, run it through this website, and post what year/model you exactly have? (iMac Late-2009 or whatever)
http://checkcoverage.apple.com
Do you know what version/name of OS X or macOS you were using?
Had your iMac been acting up in recent days/weeks? (graphics issues, powering off, not powering on, kernel panics, lots of beach balls and frozen mouse every 30 seconds?)
You’re right - sorry I was tired when posting and confusing it with my MacBook.
It is a mid-2011 27” iMac.
Not certain hard drive recovery is necessary but would like to fully diagnose the issue at a minimum to make sure it’s not something easy to fix before trashing it.
If it isn’t fixable I’ll need a way to remove personal information before disposing of it.
I also don’t recall what version of OS it was running. Probably was not updated recently. I vaguely recall my husband perhaps updating it the end of last July when I asked him to use it for a video conference.
The one non-trash-time possibility is that the files have gotten corrupted. It's a long shot the fact it's even showing that recovery mode screen is good. However, the fact that it is showing those pink bars (in addition to your previous screenshots) really lends (overwhelming) support to the idea of the graphics being bad.
If it loads select Disk Utilities from the recovery menu, your Macintosh HD drive (or whatever it is labeled) then try to Erase it. If that works, then close Disk Utilities to get back to the main menu and select Reinstall OS X or Reinstall macOS.
At the very least, if you can "erase" it there in Internet Recovery this saves you from having to physically extract the hard drive to protect your personal information. And this also assumes that what you said is correct that you don't care about recovering any data off the iMac.
Also, regardless if this works or not, you never indicated if you were able to get into Diagnostics (holding "D" by itself on startup). Getting that DSMOS... message in Verbose mode though, on a real iMac like yours, also indicates the graphics are going bad.
Note: With a typical Internet connection it should only take about 6-12 minutes to load Internet Recovery. You can let it try for an hour, but that would be a real bad sign, but worth waiting if it gets you to the point you can "erase" it to protect your personal info. If it doesn't load in that time it probably never will, although you could power off and try one or two more times.
It is only worth about US$300 and will cost way more than that to fix even if you can source a replacement graphics card, assuming that is the problem and there are no more issues.
Usually when these things fail it is due to over heating and the solder joints are cracked. My brother has a crate full of similar failures. Not something Apple has apparently learnt anything from, the latest brand new iMac Pro is overheating, thermally throttling and has repeated kernell panicks due to the T2 chip and Bridge OS that operates the T2.
Your iMac has lasted a long time and @#$% happens, try and save what you can and look for a replacement. Sadly Apple is not selling anything now that I would sensibly buy.
Internet recovery mode is now loading. It had me choose a network already. not sure I know what to do if it loads...
Internet recovery mode is now working... not sure I know what to do!
Ok that's encouraging! Try erasing the drive in Disk Utilities and selecting to Reinstall OS X/
27” Mac Pro desktop - turning on to pink screen and gray Apple logo. Won’t boot completely.
