Help recovering an Intel iMac 27", 2017
This is for a 2017 iMac 27" - Intel, obviously. As far as I know it was running macOS Catalina.
On boot, it chimes, the Apple logo appears, and the white loading bar gets half way in reasonable time, but then very very slowly fills out the rest. It seems to get to the end and then just stops. I've left it there for a good deal of time and it does not get any further or complete booting.
My initial assumption was the hard drive was malfunctioning.
I have done the following things to try and troubleshoot:
- Turn off and on again
- Unplug and leave for a while before turning on again (assume this resets SMC)
- Reset the PRAM/NVRAM
- Attempted to start in Recovery mode; it refuses to enter Recovery mode (this is with an Apple keyboard plugged in via cable). I assumed the Recovery partition must be missing; but this does seem very unlikely as the owner of the iMac is very unlikely to have removed it by mistake or otherwise.
- Created a bootable macOS Catalina external disk; and then held ALT at boot time and selected this external drive as the boot drive. It sees it; but then repeats the previous behaviour (very slow loading, and never actually boots to a desktop.) - it *seems* to ignore the external drive as the boot drive.
At this point, I'm thinking there is some other fault - possibly RAM, possibly motherboard, given that it won't boot from the external drive.
Is there anything else I can try to coax it in to life, as it is?
Failing that, is there any way to recover data from the hard drive (assuming it's OK) other than disassembling it and removing the drive?
FYI - it did go to the local Apple dealer, and they wrote it off with no inspection.
Thanks for any help.
iMac
