OS X :: 24" IMac Not Booting - Froze With The Spinning Wheel Of Death
Mar 18, 2010
My imac has just all of a sudden stopped working out of the blue. It was working fine yesterday and then just froze with the spinning wheel of death.
After a long long time it still was frozen so i held power button for 4 secs to power down.
PS: i am running snow leopard up to date on both macs.
I tried to power up and it has random start up issues.
1) It sometimes has the flashing folder with question mark and grey/white screen
2) It sometimes has the plain blue screen
3) It once out of the last 30 attempts to boot goes to the desktop and i noticed my wallpaper had been reset to default mac one. - Every move i made had the spinning wheel and i did not get past loading
Firefox and it froze again.
I have tried resetting the PRAM from boot disk but did not help. I ran Disk Utility from boot disk and repaired permissions and disk. No change in imac..
I have also tried pulling out one o the 4gig rams and booting and still the same problem so im guessing the ram is ok??
I have tried connecting imac to my macbook pro via 6 pin firewire cable and booing the imac into Target mode but the imac never appears on the macbook pro desktop to access files. The cd-rom appears showing the disk in the imac and i could eject it from the macbook pro. So looks like the target mode boot works, kind of..
I am running out of options and found out today my imac is not under warranty anymore.. !!!!! $%#%$#%
I'm currently using Win 7 on my partitioned drive since I can't get OS X to boot. Here's what I did to screw everything up: Installed SL awhile back without performing what people here are referring to as a "clean install" (I had lots of third party apps installed). Things seemed to be working fine, though Finder seemed to lag more in 10.6 than it did in 10.5. Today, however, I tried updating Parallels 4.0. It required that I reboot in order to finish the installation.
But, when the Apple logo appeared, that damned spinner just wouldn't stop. [Perhaps Parallels is "tainting" the kernel?] First, I tried reinstalling from the SL Install DVD. No luck there. I tried downgrading to 10.5 (archive and install). Still didn't boot. I even tried several volume repairs. Those didn't help either. So, now I've heard that some users are having luck booting in safe mode. But, if I try that, will I be able to transfer data to a backup drive?
Why my safari freezing on me daily? I am often opening new tabs and viewing 4 or 5 pages at once, and while they are loading it seems to be stuck on the annoying spinning rainbow wheel, ultimately leading me to end the program for not responding.
When I start up my iMac, it runs ok for a good 3-4 minutes, then all of a sudden when I try to click somewhere, I get the spinning wheel of death for about 2-3 minutes. Then when I click somewhere else I get another spinning wheel of death for another few minutes. This goes on and on and the computer is basically unusable, unless I want to wait 30 minutes to complete easy tasks that should take 2 minutes.
I tried resetting the ram by holding apple-option-P-R while restarting, but nothing is working. I have a good 15% free on my hard drive.
My computer stopped charging and turning on a short while after it was dropped.
I bought a new charger and my dad managed to fix it. (after i was told by a tech expert at a dodgy asian store the main processer had to be replaced) The only issue im having are. The spinny wheel apears in almost all tasks, internet , browsing flies , clicking top tab.
It only appears for about 30 seconds then goes away, sometimes freezing completely, It seems to happen less when the computer is stationary but still will happen quite often even just typing text. Logic Pro after reinstalling refuses to Open. Music sometimes freezes skips for 5-10 seconds.
I did some research and try a few things its not the CPU usage cause i been checking using that program that checks. Is there a way i can check what part is failing through software or maybe do a general clean up? since it was reformated.
Do i need to get a new computer or just a replacement part if i eliminate all other issues? Or could it be the start up drive?
I have a macbook 2.1ghz with OSX 10.5.8 running with 4gb of 667mhz DDR2
Recently I have been getting spinning beach balls of death on a constant biases. They come when I try to open web pages such as [URL]... ANYTHING actually. They come when I try to open applications, they seem to come when I try to do almost anything. I cannot force quit when they come. I have tried waiting for them to go away, sometimes up to an hour and nothing happens. They have come when I try to open utilities to try to figure out what is wrong. They come in safe mode.
I freed up hard disk space, over 60 gigs of the 120 gig hard drive. NOTHING.
I am getting the spinning wheel of death on most applications at the moment. I have read about the varios ways to trouble shoot but they do sound quite involved eg going to the utility monitor and have tried that but did not get very far with it as I dont understand the menus.
I think my hd went out. I have a G4 dual 1ghz (pretty sure, can't see it right now) mdd, os 10.411, and it froze up so I did a hard restart: hold the power button for 10 seconds till it shuts off. When I turned it on the next time it would not boot up. Gray screen withe the spinning wheel of bars like it is thinking, searching, and longing to start up. Booted from the install cd to access the hd, but it acts like it wants to install the os fresh.
I put in a samsung 500gb drive, and since yesterday this one is also doing strange. I was browsing the internet and it started launching itunes and going really slow although i wasn't doing anything, then it showed a force quit window telling me there was not enough memory on the startup disk for applications, althoug i still have roughly 340gb of free space. I just thought of restarting it maybe that solved the problem. But no, since then it doesn't startup in mac os x, bootcamp works fine with windows 7 installed. But starting snow leopard just gives me a grey screen like the safe boot screen with the progress bar and the spinning wheel. the progress bar dissapears after a while and the wheel etternaly spins.
Tried single user mode and fsck -fy but it only gives me some dislocations, it gets till the repairing Tree and then says that the volume Macintosh HD could not be repaired. Also tried to reset Pram but that neither. starting up with a bootable usb with the mac os x install dvd on it gives me the prohibitory sign after 2 minutes. I still have to try with my original disc, but that one is at home and I'm not gonna be there till next month.
I was away at a friend's yesterday and left my computer on and downloading a torrent (I have done this before and everything has been fine). When I came back today, I noticed that my computer was working very slowly so I restarted it. However, it would just stay at the grey screen with the wheel spinning forever instead of moving on to the blue screen.
I know that this has been reported many times before, even on this forum, but everything I tried does not work. I tried:
Holding down Command+S at startup and entering the command fsck -fy. Did not fix the problem Opening the Install Disc and going into Disk Utility. I repaired the permissions and verified that the HD has no problems but the problem persisted.
Going into Safe Mode. This actually works fine, but unfortunately offers an extremely limited functionality of my computer.
When I open safari colored spinning wheel appears and locks up safari, I have to force quit to get out. It also appears briefly when other programmes are opened but doesn't seem to affect them.
Info: iMac (21.5-inch Mid 2011), Mac OS X (10.7.5)
My iMac is really slow when I turn it on. The internet starts to come up but I get the dreaded spinning colored wheel. I have another Windows computer that hits the internet immediately. I am seeing the spinning wheel more and more all the time.
I migrated my macbook pro over to my imac successfully. The weird thing was, when it asked about users, i didnt have the opportunity to overwrite (or merge) the mbp user with the existing imac user. That option was greyed out and the only option was to create a NEW user.. Not the best
None the less, i created the new user from my MBP and figured i would just move a few files over from the other user that I wanted and delete the old existing user.. but i cant!!!
I made sure to give full access to all admins and moved the files with no problem.. (p.s. both accounts are admin users with full permissions)
The problem is when I go into the system preferences, and click on users and then unlock the preferences, I can click on '-' to remove the old user and it asks if i want to create a disk image, just delete it, or remove just the user and keep the home folder.. I chose to create a disk image and delete the user
This is when it gets stuck. I click continue and i get the spinning pinwheel of death.
rebooted and still the same thing.
whats going on?? I dont know how to check if the computer is just not creating the disk image and there is something wrong with that, or if there is something seriously wrong with how the users/files are linked.
After having inserted a dvd borrowed from the library which my Imac had a really tough time reading, I turned off my Imac as usual. Since then when I turn my mac on the fan starts roaring and i don't get beyond the first white screen with the sort of clocked wheel just going round and round. I don't have a clue to what to do.
I have a very old IMac which I purchased back in 2005, and has been working fine. I have left it in storage about 1 and 1/2 years ago. Just now I try to restart it, the screen is forever stuck in the grey screen with the spinning wheel. I tried many times off-on, hold down the apple function key but none worked. I no longer have the rebooting CD with me. I wonder whether the computer can still be saved? I have already backed up the contents so it doesn't matter if fixing the computer requires me to delete all my old files. I think it's tiger or earlier that it's using.
i need some help regarding my iMac. I was busy installing combo update 10.5.8 on my iMac when the power in the entire house went down due to the snow. When I started my iMac back up it got stuck on the apple logo with the spinning wheel below it. I can leave it there for as long as i like nothing happens. I had the idea to reboot using the CD's i got with the iMac but there is already a disc in the discloader so i can't put the reboot CD's in. anybody know how i can get my iMac to work again? There aren't any files on the computer that i neccesarely need but if i would be able to save my photo's etc. it would be great.
Mac won't boot, starts with white apple screen and spinning wheel. Also has grey loading bar which disappears after loaded then stays at white apple screen.
I changed my trusty Powerbook for a newer MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz Intel with 2GB 667 Mhz DDR2 SDRAM (that's what it says) running 10.5.8, so I could run CS4 Photoshop, Dreamweaver etc etc. I just cannot work with it! Everytime I try to do anything, I have to wait while the wheel of death decides to show me a menu, scroll up the page, select and delete an item, etc. etc. you get the picture. Quark and Illustrator seem to run perfectly ok.
When I launch Mail, there's no new mail. When I try to use one of the drop-down menus, I get a spinning beach ball of death, and a program freeze; I can't even access the Mail menu anymore.To bring my computer back to normal, I Force Quit Mail - and that will stop the freeze. What's the best way to restore functioning on Mail given this error?
I like to play games such as Castleville by zynga but it constantly freezes, i have adobe flash player, but still it does the same then the colured ball keeps spinning round and round. I have tried uninstalling and installing flash player as it told me to do but to no avail, I am starting to think that there is something wrong with the computer, but it is not that old. I am using Mac OS X version 10.6.8 intel core 2 duo
I have a 13 in. black MacBook (late 2006) and somehow have managed to break it. Last year I had trouble where the computer randomly messed up how it booted and I had to use live Linux cd's to recover my data. I had to completely wipe the drive that time. Things went blissfully on until yesterday when it froze, after waiting for at least a minute when I held the power button down to kill it. I tried to restart but it froze on the apple with the spinning progress indicator. I killed again, and started in single user mode, where I got a plethora of disk0 I/O errors. After waiting there a while the computer stopped doing anything so I killed again. Now, it doesn't even recognize the fact that the hard drive exists. I am able to boot a Linux cd but there is no hard drive anywhere. All help is great as I don't want to keep using this win7 computer.
I can barely type this post or do anything on my mac book pro without a spinning wheel popping up. Any help would be appreciated. I have cleared Pram, ran disk utility fix permissions.
My SL was working perfectly until yesterday. I got my late 08 UMBP back from AppleCare without any replacement (see post here). They just run a kind of apple test suit on an external OSX, I guess they booted from a firewire disk.
Anyway, now I getting very often a system hang with a spinning wheel. When I try to repair permissions in the Disk Utility, the progress it stays like 10 minutes on the same place at the very beginning, then spinning wheel again then the system doesn't react. I can move the mouse that's all.
I just got my imac 21.5 a week ago, and now already a problem. It was working fine until now.
I have been copying and pasting pictures and avatars from forums onto Microsoft office (office mac 2008). And tonight I got the dreadful color spinning wheel when I tried to copy more. I wouldn't go away after 10 minutes, so I restarted the computer. I reopened office, and it still had the wheel. It keeps saying it has to close. Why is this happening? Is it bad to copy and paste?
In the past couple of weeks, Finder on my MacBook has been ridiculously laggy in doing just about anything. For instance, if I try to rename a file, I can usually count on having to wait anywhere from 3 to 10 seconds for the new name to appear on the Desktop. The same thing often occurs when moving files. Finder also constantly beachballs for ~5 seconds, which extends to things like save dialogs in other applications -- if I open up a Save as... dialog, the app usually hangs for awhile waiting for Finder to figure itself out. During these periods of lag, the computer is otherwise 100% responsive -- I can use other apps, I can open other apps via LaunchBar or the Dock (as long as I don't try to use Finder, which is busy beachballing), and my CPU usage sits at around 90% idle.
No problems at all except for Finder constantly beachballing and lagging. Performing disk tasks like moving and renaming files via Terminal complete instantaneously, so it doesn't look to be a problem with my disk. When I started writing this post, Finder was "Preparing to move" one file, and only just now finished. I don't recall exactly when these problems started, but it's possible it was around the time I upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard. I imagine that reinstalling Snow Leopard would fix these problems, but I'd rather not resort to that. I've got another computer running the same software as far as I can tell that doesn't exhibit any of these problems.
