[jrramsey]

I'm stumped. I have an older iMac G5 (1.8) running OS-X 10.5. It was working fine until I rebooted today. Now it stops at the "Apple" screen and there's no spinning wheel. I booted off of CD, did a Disk Check, repaired some permissions, but no success. When I go to target mode, I can fully access the hard drive. I've even reset the PRAM a couple of times with good strong "bongs". Still no luck. Booting off of CD seems to indicated basic hardware is good but what else can I do to verify the Hard Drive is the culprit or am I missing something?

(Good news is my Time Machine backup worked perfectly and now my MacBook Pro is fully up-to-speed to my iMac).

I wide open to suggestions.

[seanc]

You could do an archive and install on the iMac. What is the S.M.A.R.T status of your hard drive?

[jrramsey]

S.M.A.R.T. status is "verified". Everything else seems fine.

Maybe the best is to do an archive and install. This is the original drive and the machine is almost 4 years old. Thanks for the suggestions but I'm still wondering "what the heck" happened.

Thanks, Seanc.

[PBG4 User]

Try booting in single user mode (Apple+Option+S I think?) and see what happens.

[jrramsey]

I tried the archive and install. It went through the entire process and then hung again on reboot.

I then tried the single user and no luck. When I did another permissions check/repair, it said there were a bunch of permissions that had changed and could not be repaired (user/bin/....)

So....I did a complete erase of the hard drive, reformatting, clean install of Leopard, and a restore from Time Machine. All is very stable now as I'll see how it goes for the next week or so.

I'm guessing there was either a flaw in the HD which caused these errors or a "bug" of some sort. I started having problems when I was installing Adobe 8 Acrobat reader and it gave me all sorts of errors.

Anyway, it seems to be fine for now but I'm still quite curious...