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2009 iMac: long wait at white screen, extremely slow AHT

I've got a 2009 Core 2 Duo iMac that was seemingly refusing to boot. It just kept displaying a white screen forever. I've had some breakthroughs though: I left the iMac on its white screen for about an hour while holding down the Alt button with a weight. The boot menu showed up. Selecting Macintosh HD just froze it again (I left it for several hours to see if it would unfreeze but it didn't). I then put weights on the PRAM reset buttons and left it at its white screen, and sure enough, the iMac rebooted with a louder chime after an hour or so. It didn't seem to fix anything though.


I then suspected the hard drive might be to blame. I installed a different hard drive onto which I had put a bootable Yosemite installer and nothing else. An hour after booting the Mac, it loaded up the installer. Everything inside the installer works but is quite (not extremely) slow. Click something, wait 10 seconds, the Mac reacts.


So I wanted to run a hardware test. I used this Apple Hardware Test download and this trick (using Terminal inside the OS X installer to bless the hardware test on a usb drive). After rebooting and waiting an hour the hardware test loaded up, again extremely slow. Language selection took 5 minutes, and probing the hardware took so long I went to sleep. I've now had a weight on the "T" key to start the hardware test for about an hour and it has yet to start. This really is very, very weird. Anybody ever experienced something similar? Guesses as to the cause?

iMac

Posted on Jun 30, 2015 2:14 AM

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2009 iMac: long wait at white screen, extremely slow AHT

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