iMac Dead?

[Afasoas]

A friends having some trouble with his iMac.

" last night i was on the mac as normal..i tried to empty the trash..and as i did that  ( i was runnng quite alot of other applications )  ....the mac froze...so i turned it off and restarted it but now all i get is a white screen with a grey circle in middle with a diaginal line through it. underneath that is a small moving circle of lines..any ideas what i can do here?"

It sounds like it's not booting ... corrupt kernel? Is it a case of just reinstalling OSX? If so will his data be okay?
Any thoughts/experience/pointers at previous threads more than welcome

Thanks

[Rhys W]

Try booting from a CD/DVD?

[Afasoas]

Oooh.. .added complication. There seems to be a CD in the machine that he can't eject. Do they have a pin hole which you can use to force an eject like a PC CD-ROM drive?

Thanks

[Jaded]

Try restarting the machine with the 'T' key held down. The machine should start up with a Firewire logo (or Firewaire and Thunderbolt) jumping slowly about the screen. This means that motherboard is more likely to be OK.

If you have this you will be able to connect it to another (host) machine by Firewire (or Thunderbolt) and access the HD on the host machine. You can then see if you can repair it. You will also see the CD/DVD that is in the drive and will be able to eject it.

If he has a USB mouse he can eject the CD/DVD by holding down the mouse button during start-up. There is amore modern way of doing this, but I can't remember it.