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I have and iMac bought late 2011 that now does not want to startup. I first see the apple icon, then loading wheel, then loading bar. The bar disappears then the wheel keeps spinning then nothing. I can command, option, p and r; to get to disk utility but can't seem to do anything from there. Allof our photos are here and the last 18 months of uni assignments, other than this not much I'm desparate to save. Can someone please help?
iMac (21.5-inch Mid 2011)
Do you see this ?. If yes, your hard disk seems to be at his end. Just try to startup (by pressing cmd-R) from the Recovery HD and perform a Repair Disk with Disk Utility. If this works, take a Time Machine backup and replace the disk.
http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6194/6129750231_8a4270e52f_o.jpg
The boot drive is malfunctioning, or you have some other hardware fault.
If you want to preserve the data on the boot drive, you must try to back up now, before you do anything else. It may or may not be possible. If you don't care about the data, you can skip this step.
There are several ways to back up a Mac that is unable to fully boot. You need an external hard drive to hold the backup data.
1. Boot into Recovery (command-R at startup) or from a local Time Machine backup volume (option key at startup.) Launch Disk Utility and follow the instructions in the support article linked below, under “Instructions for backing up to an external hard disk via Disk Utility.”
How to back up and restore your files
2. If you have access to a working Mac, and both it and the non-working Mac have FireWire or Thunderbolt ports, boot the non-working Mac in target disk mode by holding down the key combination command-T at the startup chime. Connect the two Macs with a FireWire or Thunderbolt cable. The internal drive of the machine running in target mode will mount as an external drive on the other machine. Copy the data to another drive. This technique won't work with USB, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth.
How to use and troubleshoot FireWire target disk mode
3. If the internal drive of the non-working Mac is user-replaceable, remove it and mount it in an external enclosure or drive dock. Use another Mac to copy the data.
I cannot start my iMac
