iMac wont boot

[Shnorkiller]

hi all,

i am helping out a friend who tried to boot her iMac this morning which all of a sudden wont load past the white page with the grey apple logo and spinning circle.

I entered disk utilities, tried verifying the disk, this process was interrupted and i was then prompted to repair the disk. i tried doing so yet the repair did not complete, saying something about nodes and that i should backup and reinstall the OS.

Luckily everything is backed up on a time machine, but the user relies heavily on archicad to perform her work and formatting the mac will apparently mean they will have to come out and install the software for her (??) which will obviously cost her valuable time. Luckily she has a MBP that she can use if need be, but that is obviously less than ideal.

Is there any other route i could pursue in order to try get this iMac functional again before the end of the day? What could have caused this and what do you think is wrong?

any assistance would be hugely appreciated!!

thanks in advance.

 

[bwana]

I've fixed similar problems in the past with disk warrior.

 

[Shnorkiller]

I've fixed similar problems in the past with disk warrior.

The problem is that she'd rather take it to an apple store than spend $99 on something she verly likely wont use again. But thanks for the suggestion and feedback!

Any other ideas?

 

[bwana]

The problem is that she'd rather take it to an apple store than spend $99 on something she verly likely wont use again. But thanks for the suggestion and feedback!

Any other ideas?

I use DW on a fairly regular basis, often in lieu of First Aid, and have never regretted buying it.

How much did the Apple Store quote for repairs?

Going forward instead of relying on Time Machine she might consider using an application such as SuperDuper to clone her drive, the process can be totally automated. That way in the event of another problem she just clones everything back and voila.

Just out of curiosity why can't she reinstall archicad herself?

 

[Shnorkiller]

I use DW on a fairly regular basis, often in lieu of First Aid, and have never regretted buying it.

How much did the Apple Store quote for repairs?

Going forward instead of relying on Time Machine she might consider using an application such as SuperDuper to clone her drive, the process can be totally automated. That way in the event of another problem she just clones everything back and voila.

Just out of curiosity why can't she reinstall archicad herself?

This only happened this morning, so haven't taken it in for a quote as of yet, seeing this happen is making me consider buying DW for myself.

Thanks for the advice, I think i am going to recommend that to her for the future.

I think she was just in a flat panic about her computer. I have since seen that it is going to be easy to manually install the software. So not really a train smash.

Thanks for all your feedback and assistance, hugely appreciated.

 

[SauRoNZA]

Well if you have a Time Machine just reinstall, I don't understand the problem?

By default OSX reinstall won't rewrite your data anyway unless you manually go and format the drive, so you can't lose anything really.

On older versions choose "Archive and Reinstall" on newer ones just click through it.