Boot camp often fails to boot - fix?
Boot Camp often fails to boot at all, leaving the iMac dead at the bootloader screen. Have to force shutdown by holding down power button. Full hardware test declared the hardware 100% functional. Disk Utility and chkdsk sees nothing but fire. This is intermitent/random and it proved impossible to "force" it's occurance. It happen when it darn well please?
First occurance goes back to late July 2011, a few days after a major thunder storm that caused pulsing power blackouts (as in, very short bursts - like turning off the power then immediately flipping it back on - too quick to actually shut the computer down). Surely, this must be the source of the issue? Right? Alas it doesn't adds up. Power supply of this house is very stable and reliable. Power fluctuations are unhearded of. It's also connected to a surge protected outlet. The system itself, in Mac or Win, is flat out stable. It does not freeze out of the blue like what a damaged power supply would cause. It only ever freeze upon choosing a partition via the boot camp interface.
Further observation as compared to normal boot procedure: Upon selection of the Windows partition, the LED on the USB mouse turns off then back on again a short moment later. Windows loads up normally. When the crash occurs, the LED never turn back on. It's just dead right there and then.
What's going on and what can I do to fix this? It feels like some hardware initialisation fails for some reasons. It's ough to be around the USB systems itself but what do I know anyway?
P.S.: Please, don't mention the dreaded format and re-install. It's a 20 hours job. I'm not going there. ty đ
Message was edited by: Virgule - changed a "foul" word
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.3), i7, 8GB