Blue screen and spinning wheel at startup

Reinstall OS X without erasing the drive

Do the following:

1. Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions

Boot from your Snow Leopard Installer disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the installer.

If DU reports errors it cannot fix, then you will need Disk Warrior and/or Tech Tool Pro to repair the drive. If you don't have either of them or if neither of them can fix the drive, then you will need to reformat the drive and reinstall OS X.

2. Reinstall Snow Leopard

If the drive is OK then quit DU and return to the installer. Proceed with reinstalling OS X. Note that the Snow Leopard installer will not erase your drive or disturb your files. After installing a fresh copy of OS X the installer will move your Home folder, third-party applications, support items, and network preferences into the newly installed system.

Download and install the Combo Updater for the version you prefer from support.apple.com/downloads/.

If you cannot boot from your installer DVD on the iMac, then you can try connecting to your other computer via Firewire cable and use Target Disk Mode to boot and install from the other computer - Transferring files between two computers using FireWire

Read through my User Tip here, there is a section on resolving BlueScreen and Gray Screen issues with links to Apple issued articles.

Also there is information there for recovering your data off machine.

Tell us what you tried, your machine specifics and if you have made a backup of your personal data off the machine of just your user files to a storage drive or not or is TimeMachine your only backup?

https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3046

Sorry to have to put you through that, but it's difficult repeating the same information over and over, thanks. 🙂

Did you read the last paragraph of my post?

Five ways to eject a stuck CD or DVD from the optical drive

Ejecting the stuck disc can usually be done in one of the following ways:

1. Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the left mouse button until the disc ejects.

2. Press the Eject button on your keyboard.

3. Click on the Eject button in the menubar.

4. Press COMMAND-E.

5. If none of the above work try this: Open the Terminal application in your Utilities folder. At the prompt enter or paste the following:

/usr/bin/drutil eject

If this fails then try this:

Boot the computer into Single-user Mode. At the prompt enter the same command as used above. To restart the computer enter "reboot" at the prompt without quotes.

Have you held down Shift key upon boot?

Have you tried holding down option key at boot? What do you see?

Power off the comptuer and boot holding the command and v keys, tell us what you see, like how far it gets before it stops.

The keyboard and mouse have to be wired in order to any of the boot key commands to function.

ivivid wrote:

So is there any way I can circumnavigate this to get my machine running?

Well a OF password would certanly lock you out of the machine, take it to a Apple Store and they can help you out.

ivivid... I realize this post was from earlier this year, but can you share what the final outcome was here? I'm having the same issues with my imac. Doesn't boot past blue screen. Tried all possible key combos and booting options with no luck.