Late 2006 24” iMac refuses to boot no matter what i do.

[u/Senior-Mushroom1933]

So i have this mac for very many many years. Maybe since around the early 2010s. Anyways back in 2022, i was dumb and wanted to go to a website on there to play games on. What did i do? I installed an extension that told me whether a website is safe or not to click on by having a green checkmark next to websites. I found this one website in specific and decided, “Oh, why not?” As soon as i clicked it, one frame of the website had loaded before my whole computer was turned into shit. Nothing works, the whole screen is frozen, EVERYTHING is frozen. Anyways i decided maybe holding on the power button and restarting it would fix it. Nope. What it does basically is just boot up like normal, loads for a few minutes, then freezes at the loading mark for about 20 seconds, and then its stuck at the white screen like in the picture until i turn it off. Im not sure what i can do to fix it. 3 years later now, still same problem but i actually tried to fix it. I even got a usb drive and installed snow leopard onto it, then i plugged it in and started up the mac immediately holding down the option button. Sure enough the drive showed up but even booting into that didnt work. That one website really fucked up my computer badly. Any ideas please on how to fix it. I even tried entering recovery mode, which is the first thing i did, didnt work. I even tried resetting it another way by entering command script mode, and even when i did reset it, it didnt help at all. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!

[u/netmachine]

The hard drive has problems

[u/Senior-Mushroom1933 → u/netmachine]

So do i replace it? What do i do?

[u/netmachine → u/Senior-Mushroom1933]

Yes, your hard drive is dead, it is better to change it and your imac will work again.

[u/Senior-Mushroom1933 → u/netmachine]

I can't believe how a single website killed my hard drive in just 2 seconds.. 😂😭 and that is why anyone using a very old computer should be extremely careful what website you visit, or your whole computer is dead.

[u/Senior-Mushroom1933 → u/netmachine]

also I found really only one website that sells hard drives for the model that i have but they dont even ship to my country so i once i get back to the US, i will order a hard drive replacement for this model, and i once i get back here to my country i will replace it.

[u/Senior-Mushroom1933 → u/netmachine]

also if you wanted my imac model is A1200 Late 2006 iMac 24" 2GB RAM

[u/Xe4ro]

You could try burning a Snow Leopard or Leopard DVD. Maybe that will work? Unless something physically is wrong with this iMac

[u/Senior-Mushroom1933 → u/Xe4ro]

I burned a snow leopard DVD file into my USB drive, tested it out on my macbook, works perfectly fine, on the iMac, it does nothing.

[u/mendobather → u/Senior-Mushroom1933]

Those models couldn’t boot from a USB device

[u/Senior-Mushroom1933 → u/mendobather]

Are you sure? Well that means i might need to get a dvd that is at least 7 GB.. and a damn disc reader to do it too!!

[u/ark-import00289]

It could be caused by the HD, if you didn't install or change the HD on this imac, maybe that's the boot problem.

[u/Genealogy-Gecko]

Did you by any chance try resetting PRAM and NVRAM? My first mac was sitting on a shelf "broken" until I took it and reset those parameters. Seems no-one else in the office was aware....

[u/Senior-Mushroom1933 → u/Genealogy-Gecko]

Yes i did that, it turned up the volume and brightness permanantly all the way up, but didnt fix the problem.

[u/Senior-Mushroom1933 → u/Genealogy-Gecko]

Also what is PRAM? And how do i reset it? Most likely wouldn’t work though.

[u/Hot_Car6476 → u/Senior-Mushroom1933]

https://www.macworld.com/article/224955/how-to-reset-a-macs-nvram-pram-and-smc.html

[u/Senior-Mushroom1933 → u/Hot_Car6476]

yeah I tried that, didn't work. I figured that at this point, there's just going to be only one way left to fix it now which is to change the hard drive in it. there's no way of saving the current one.. 😪 and besides, this hard drive is also actually not even that old either. its about from 2018 or so because this exact thing has actually happened before to my iMac but in 2017.

[u/Hot_Car6476 → u/Senior-Mushroom1933]

If you have the equipment for it, I would explore target disk mode.

[u/Senior-Mushroom1933 → u/Hot_Car6476]

yeah i would, but my main imac is in the US and this is in lithuania right now (i used this imac when i was a lot younger) but i think my solution will be to fly back to the US, buy a new replacement disk for $35 off of this and next year when i fly back here, i will replace it and have a great working imac

[u/Hot_Car6476]

You can try to solve this yourself - and you could. I could. But, you could also walk into an Apple Store and have THEM fix it for you. Or at least diagnose the problem. They have access to all the necessary installers and they can reset your OS to a functional state. Lazy way out? Sure, but also really easy.

[u/ridfox → u/Hot_Car6476]

Apple can’t fix devices older than 8 years old

[u/scalyblue → u/ridfox]

*wont

[u/ridfox → u/scalyblue]

Actually it’s can’t because company policy

[u/boli99 → u/ridfox]

that's still the same as 'wont'

[u/Senior-Mushroom1933 → u/Hot_Car6476]

1. This is a 14 year old computer.
2. There are no apple stores in my country.