iMac issues.

[UltraMega]

So a customer brought me a 2010 27 inch iMac that he said wasn't booting up to the OS. Turned on, just didn't boot. When he brought it to me and I turned it on, it booted up just fine. I rebooted it a couple of times and it worked every time. Given the age and the fact that it had apparently failed to boot at least a couple of times, I asked the customer if he wanted me to replace the hard drive since that is a likely cause and pretty cheap and easy to do, so I replaced the HDD with an SSD, reinstalled high Seirra 10.13 and everything worked normally. I gave it back to the customer and he has been using it for a few days at least without issues. 

 

Today he reached out to me and told me it's not booting again, and it never boots. It's not an intermittent issue, it fails to boot every time now. He removed all devices except the mouse and tried booting it that way, same issue. 

 

Kinda at a loss, I would expect most hardware issues to be intermittent if something was failing but this hasn't been very intermittent so far. I didn't see a lot of dust when I opened it, but there are a lot of areas you can't seen on the inside of an iMac without digging further. Could dust cause something like this? Bad ram? 

 

The customer replaced the ram on his own and he had some issues after that so he switched back to the original ram. He never had any issues before that. 

Edited June 16, 2022 by UltraMega

[Sir Beregond]

So when you say doesn't boot, does it even power on? Or powers on but doesn't boot?

Edited June 16, 2022 by Sir Beregond

[UltraMega]

3 minutes ago, Sir Beregond said:

So when you say doesn't boot, does it even power on? Or powers on but doesn't boot?

Yea; white screen, apple logo, then reboots. 

[Sir Beregond]

Maybe try resetting PRAM/NVRAM?

[UltraMega]

29 minutes ago, Sir Beregond said:

Maybe try resetting PRAM/NVRAM?

I'm not very familiar with the apple specific stuff like this. What does that do? 

 

Could this be a dying CMOS battery, or whatever the apple equivalent is? 

 

That's probably it... Freaking apple, of course it would be on the back of the motherboard and require basically 100% disassembly to replace a battery. 

Edited June 16, 2022 by UltraMega

[Sir Beregond]

13 minutes ago, UltraMega said:

I'm not very familiar with the apple specific stuff like this. What does that do? 

 

Could this be a dying CMOS battery, or whatever the apple equivalent is? 

 

That's probably it... Freaking apple, of course it would be on the back of the motherboard and require basically 100% disassembly to replace a battery. 

I think its kinda like a CMOS reset. I just remember them doing that on my work MacBook Pro. But like you I am not really an Apple/Mac guy, so not that familiar.

 

That was going to be my other thought. And yeah...of course with Apple.