Why does my iMac have repeated gray screen to reboot after recent hard drive and memory card upgrades on my 2006 iMac?

Question

Level 1

9 points

Why does my iMac have repeated gray screen to reboot after recent hard drive and memory card upgrades on my 2006 iMac?

I recently had an upgrade for my hard drive from 500 GB to 3 TB and my memory from 2 GB to 4 GB on my late 2006 24 inch iMac 2.33 GHz Intel core 2 duo with Nvidia GeForce 7600 GT video card. My wife was on the computer and the screen froze. I did a hard reboot and it would only reboot to translucent white screen with gray and orange stripes underneath and the gray Apple, and then a gray screen directing to reboot the computer. It would not get past this reboot window. I tried many suggested reboots, single, verbose, safe mode, and others, no luck. I took the computer back to the computer store where the upgrades were performed. He has had it there for two weeks now and no word on repair. I thought I would ask the Apple community about what the nature of this problem might be. It is the first time that this computer has crashed and not been able to boot back up. I'm wondering if there is a problem with the Western Digital 3 TB hard drive black and or the memory card upgrade? Or, is it possible that my Nvidia graphics card died? Please advise and thank you for your assistance! -Mike

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.5), Late 2006 24" 2.33 Core 2 Duo 500GB

Posted on Nov 21, 2012 10:55 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Kappy

Level 10

361,741 points

Nov 21, 2012 10:58 AM in response to mikestan56

Reinstalling Lion/Mountain Lion Without Erasing the Drive

Boot to the Recovery HD: Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.

Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions: Upon startup select Disk Utility from the main menu. Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions as follows.

When the recovery menu appears select Disk Utility. 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 main menu.

Reinstall Lion/Mountain Lion: Select Reinstall Lion/Mountain Lion and click on the Continue button.

Note: You will need an active Internet connection. I suggest using Ethernet if possible because it is three times faster than wireless.

Reply