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Black screen on start up

Hi this is my first post on here, I'm no Mac geek but this has got me stumped. I know there are endless threads on this but can't seem to get anywhere so thought I better ask you good people for help.


I Have a late 08 ( I think) ot early 09 iMac. It has just suddenly started doing the black screen on start up, I'm getting no cursor in the corner and on start up I get a very quick flash of the desktop before it goes black. I have plugged in to my TV and managed to get it to work once so ran the disk repair in disk utilities. I went out and came back to find it had gone off. Tried it again and it still loads black on the iMac however the tv loads up the default wallpaper ( space scene) but no icons or menus. I have tried booting in safe mode and resetting the pram etc but not working. i am suspecting faulty ram as all of a sudden it stopped chiming on start up until I did the: command - option - P - R command and let it chime a few times. It now chimes on start up but is still the same.


I Bought some ram for it a year or so ago and thought it was running fine until yesterday... The only other thing to add is that occasionally it used to have a grapics melt down and go a bit green and blue with the desktop still underneath. This usually resolved itself in the end if left.


should I try taking out the extra ram and booting it to see if that's at fault? Or will that cause me more issues?


looking for more ideas of what to try before having to shell out on getting it looked at.


hope you can help,


thanks,


Joe

Posted on May 28, 2015 4:22 AM

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1 reply

May 28, 2015 4:53 AM in response to Joer90

Removing the third party ram shoukd not cause additional issues as long as enough ram is still available to boot. There really isn't enough information to offer suggestions. Would be helpful to know exactly which iMac, which version of OS X and how much ram is installed. Ram issues are usually reported at start up with a series of three tones, a 5 second pause and three tones. From what little info we have I would strongly suspect that your PRAM battery needs to be replaced or worst case, your logic board has failed. Do you have your original gray install discs? If so you can try running the Apple Hardware Test.

Black screen on start up

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