Update on issue - - -. Booted from a 4-week old SuperDuper backup (on a Firewire drive). Held Option key while powering on. Operations are very slow and I don’t know if I’m responding to the SuperDuper or iMac messages. Got boot disk options - Macintosh HD; recovery disk and SuperDuper disk. Selected SuperDuper and logged in. Got information message: “OSX can’t repair the disk Macintosh HD … you can still open or copy files … backup and repair a.s.a.p."
Started Disk Utility and Verified disk Macintosh HD. After step “check catalog file” got messages in red: Invalid key length. The volume Macintosh HD could not be verified completely. Error: this disk needs to be repaired. Click Repair Disk. Did Repair Disk and got message “Error: Disk Utility can’t repair the disk - - - reformat - - - and restore files from backup.” Sounds rather serious. I did not reformat disk. Any advice (apart from having a strong coffee - - -)? Cheers (sort of) Alan On 23 Nov 2014, at 1:40 pm, Alan Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > Help please! > > My late 2009 iMac 21.5" Intel Core 2 Duo 3.06GHz 12G RAM with OSX 10.9.5 > Mavericks fails to complete the start-up sequence. > > Mac was powered off via Apple - Shut Down. Power-up sequence starts > normally: chime and grey screen, then the Apple logo and daisy wheel. Then I > get a progress bar as if it is loading something (I don’t recall if this is > normal). After about 5 percent progress the bar disappears, the daisy wheel > continues for a second or so and then the screen goes black plus silence from > the internal hard drive. > > The only wired peripherals are two WD My Book Studio Firewire external hard > drives in tandem (one cable from Mac). Tried powering up with the Firewire > cable plugged in (normal) and then unplugged. No joy. > > I tried starting in Safe Mode but could not do so. There was no change, but > possibly a slightly longer time interval between chime and daisy wheel. > > Other observations, but may be red herrings. I used AirDrop to move EyeTV > recordings to the iMac this morning. Came back 30 minutes later to move the > videos to a WD My Book Studio for iTunes. Noticed that one of the two > external drives did not show in Finder. I powered off the iMac so I could > access the drives, power cords, etc. Then a few minutes later I attempted to > start up the iMac - - -. > > Regards, > Alan > > > > > > > > > -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- > Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml> > Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> > Settings & Unsubscribe - > <http://lists.wamug.org.au/listinfo/wamug.org.au-wamug> -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml> Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> Settings & Unsubscribe - <http://lists.wamug.org.au/listinfo/wamug.org.au-wamug>
