[dewhast]

Well, I knew i shouldn't have ever put Windows on one of my macs.

My 24 in iMac is dead...don't know what the issue is exactly. The machine will turn on but once booting the white sleep light stays illuminated continuously. The monitor does not come on, no start up chime, just the sounds of the fans working. Thought that it might have been a ram problem at first, then a graphics card burnout, but it seems most likely its a motherboard issue or a hard drive failure. Tried zapping the pram (I don't even know if that works anymore with intel) loading from the OS X disk, etc, to no avail...switched out my ram, nothing. Of course i was running vista in boot camp to play a game when this happened, this could be a vista issue, or it could be a hardware issue caused by vista, or just a hardware issue. If i could just get the thing to boot and get me into OS X then the vista issues would be solved...deleted partition, disk repair and OS X reinstall.

Luckily I was pretty religous about backups so this doesn't effect my data, hopefully I can get this figured out but if not I still have all of my files.

Bummer. Cautionary tale for buying Applecare i guess, I've owned 10 macs and never had one die, so I stopped buying apple care with my last powerbook (which I'm typing on now and is a 3 year old champ- which would have been upgraded soon but I'll have to wait and see if I need a new desktop).

[peeb]

Just to confirm, you can't boot from the OSX disc? That should not even look at your hard disc, so a partition problem is unlikely to be the whole story.

[dewhast]

Yeah, it won't boot to the OS X disk. It looks like a toasted power supply that isn't feeding the motherboard or a motherboard issue to me and a buddy who is a IT/really intense PC gamer sort of guy, although he's not an expert on macs. Since I am a betting man, I would say that as I was happily gaming along in Vista I probably drew too much on the powersupply, had a overheat situation, or some sort of nasty occurance from Vista that smoked some hardware and the self perservation routines in the chipset didn't work right. The way it shut down initially I thought it was definately a video card, but rebooting should have brought the white screen up because that doesn't need the graphics card to display.

Another lesson I've taken from this is to not screw around too much with a computer that I use to make money, even if backed up well with externals. Rookie mistake on my part and I'm paying for it right now. I've been trying to run lightroom and CS3 with my powerbook and it is sloooow.

Looking at the warranty closely, it looks like apple is on the hook to fix it for a year anyway so I'm probably going to go that way, although it hurts my geek pride to not be able to fix it myself, as I have with my other computers with good results. I think this has convinced me it is time to get a MacPro although I've really enjoyed this iMac, its a great computer, it is just getting too difficult to run as many external drives as I need even if I do get it fixed...i thought it would work out and it didn't. Well que sera, sera.

[peeb]

Yep - take it down to the apple store... good luck.