cfrankarc

Q: iMac boots to desktop then immediately hangs on color wheel

Thank you for taking a look at my question.

 

When I boot up my iMac, everything starts up fine at first - it goes right to the desktop, the mouse moves around, and, if I'm fast, I can even click on 1 maybe 2 things before the computer completely locks up on the spinning color wheel of death.  I can still move the wheel around on the screen without any latency, but I can't actually do anything.  Typing on the keyboard does nothing, though the caps lock key does light up.  Booting in safe mode produces exactly the same results, except that it asks me to log in first.

 

Something must be starting that I need to get rid of, though I don't install much of anything on this computer and rarely make changes (it is a demo machine that lives in a small computer lab I manage, off network). I never had any issues with it, then, one day, this problem began.  Maybe I ran an OS update and that caused it to crash?

 

I'm very familiar with troubleshooting a Windows computer, but Macs don't really offer many intuitive troubleshooting options, IMO.  This seems like a fairly simple issue to reslolve, but my searches online haven't produced any results - people seem to suggest safe mode and command line solutions, but safe mode doesn't change anything and I obviously can't open a command line to type anything.

 

The iMac was purchased around 2010 and I'm 99% sure it has Yosemite installed, but unfortunately I have no way of being able to check at the moment.

 

Any assistance very welcome, thank you!

iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10.5)

Posted on Sep 15, 2016 8:20 AM

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