Screen of death

I'm running catalina 10.15.7 on an older iMac. It won't boot past the logo screen with a complete loading bar. Recovery mode doesn't work, (my hard drive is greyed out in the new image location). Neither does safe mode, sco, opt restart, nvram. The machine is due for replacement but naturally all my photos, music and dat are still on there. I almost bought Stellar data recovery, until I read some reddit reviews saying it was a scam. Is there a chance of retrieval?

iMac 21.5″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Feb 2, 2022 6:51 PM

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3 replies

rkaufmann87

Level 10

148,500 points

Feb 2, 2022 9:06 PM in response to artsurgery

I am assuming you were not using Time Machine to backup. If you were not you are about to learn a painful lesson on why using Time Machine is essential. If you are not aware of Time Machine please look over Back up your Mac with Time Machine and before you get the new Mac please buy and External Hard Disk, something like a OWC Mercury Elite Pro.

About the only other method of recovery data is using a data recovery service, however expect to spend many thousands of dollars, usually over $10,000 to recover some of your data.

artsurgery Author

Level 1

0 points

Feb 2, 2022 11:48 PM in response to rkaufmann87

Thanks for the tip. I used to use time machine but it was chewing up so much disk space i retired it.

rkaufmann87

Level 10

148,500 points

Feb 3, 2022 7:15 AM in response to artsurgery

EHD's are inexpensive. Retiring Time Machine was a bad move and it is likely to cost you your data.

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Screen of death