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iMac boots up to an empty white screen with mouse arrow

Hello


I have a 20" iMac which was purchased back in late 2006. I've been sucessfully able to upgrade the OS to 10.7.5 Lion edition. This is an Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 3GB RAM. Every so often it will boot up with an empty white screen with mouse arrow and nothing else. At that point, I normally just hold down the power button to shunt it down and restart after a bit and it would load up everything fine. At first, I thought the problem could be with the hard drive so I changed out the drive and it didn't solve the problem. I'm pretty sure that this problem has something to do with the video card.


I was wondering if there are any video/graphics card drivers or utilities that I could install to fix this issue. Also please let me know if I can try something else to narrow down a cause for this.


Thanks.

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.5), 3GB System RAM

Posted on May 28, 2013 1:35 PM

Reply
6 replies

May 29, 2013 8:02 PM in response to den.thed

Hello & thanks for your quick response on this.


I performed 2 test today. Since the operating system was newly installed and updated, I didn't find a need to go any further. Safe Mode Boot and Reset NVRAM/PRAM didn't really help with my issue. Both showed no sign of error or corruption. I also went through the memory test and it passed. At this point, I am really thinking that this issue could be due to faulty/bad graphics card. When I get a blank white screen with mouse pointer, it seems like the desktop is loaded but for some reason it doesn't get initialize on the screen and after one or two reboots, it comes up fine. Does this sounds like an issue with the video card??

May 30, 2013 4:13 PM in response to MilanThaker

MilanThaker wrote:


Hello & thanks for your quick response on this.


Your welcome!


Does this sounds like an issue with the video card??


Not really, video card problems usually show up as broken blocks, disorganized bits and pieces or a total black out.


Next I would try a couple of things:


1. Start up from Lion Recover holding the Command-R key, go to Disk Utility and Repair the Macintosh HD.


2. Then do a normal startup and while booted into OS X, go to: Apple > System Preferences > Startup Disk and make sure that your Macintosh HD OS X 10.7.5 is selected as the startup volume.

Apr 18, 2015 6:31 AM in response to Linc Davis

I know this is a zombie thread, but do you have any insight about this problem for those of us who can start in safe mode?


My iMac is a late 09 27" (10,1) and I have tried everything, including several clean installs of mavericks and Yosemite. While this problem started intermittently, and I was able to fix it in terminal mode by forcing a new startup account, now the white screen happens all the time, and nothing helps. I do have full functionality in safe mode however, and am actually typing on the afflicted machine now.


I have a hard time believing the gpu could have issues this extreme but still work insafe mode, but some have speculated maybe some vid card ram is corrupted.... am I wrong on this?


I was convinced that this was a software problem, but I have reinstalled Yosemite 4 times, and mavericks twice. Clean both times.


Any new ideas would be most welcome! Jim

iMac boots up to an empty white screen with mouse arrow

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