[TerryJ]

Hey everyone,

I am trying to get an iMac CRT, blue, back in action. All was fine until coming into the office this morning and when powering up it displayed the flashing ? and Finder icon. Fine, I thought...just boot from the restore CD and run disk repair. At that time I noticed that there was no response from the keyboard or mouse. I zapped the PRAM and the kb and mose came back to life...also unplugged the ethernet and other USB cables so only the kb and mouse are plugged in. Ran AHT and all was fine there. I can eject CD's fine by holding down the mouse button on startup and also startup from other CD's holding the 'C' key just fine.When I try and startup from the Restore disk, it gets all the way to the point of showing the stuff on the desktop and opens the disk folder where I see 'Utilities' but then the cursor always either freezes or disappears. I am using an Apple Pro optical mouse and I notice I still have power to it as the red light is glowing. I have also tried starting up from the HD holding the 'shift' key to disable the extensions but it goes straight to the flashing ?.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated!!!

[vmarks]

what if you started by holding down option?

What if you ran diskwarrior from the CD?

[Detrius]

The flashing question mark means that the computer has not found an operating system. Therefore, no amount of holding down the shift key will make a difference. If you have a completely fubar'ed directory structure, this could cause the symptoms you are describing.

What OS was the machine running before failing? Is it a slot-load? Does it have the latest firmware (4.19f)?

If it does have the latest firmware, boot it into DiskWarrior 3 and try to repair the directory. If it does not have the latest firmware (but has firewire), target disk mode the thing and hook it up to another machine to run DiskWarrior 3 on it.