iMac mid 2007 wont boot in normal mode

[aland2]

iMac mid 2007 running El Capitan. When you try to boot in normal mode, the progress bar gets about half way across, and then the screen goes blank. It will boot into Recovery mode, and into Safe mode, but is very slow in Safe mode.

Run Disk Utility multiple times and it says there is nothing wrong with the disk. Re-installed El Capitan from download, reset NVRAM, still no joy.

Customer did not have recent backup, but managed to copy user folder, and then restored from Time Machine backup from 2018. Still problems booting.

There are multiple logs in /Library/Logs pointing to a problem with Windowserver, and looking at /var/log/system.log there are a lot of lines after GPU debug info.

Any ideas? I can't get Hardware Diagnostics to start either with D or Option+D.

Booting with Command+V to get log files shows it getting as far as networking, and then swaps to a blank gray screen

 

[LuisN]

iMac mid 2007 running El Capitan. When you try to boot in normal mode, the progress bar gets about half way across, and then the screen goes blank. It will boot into Recovery mode, and into Safe mode, but is very slow in Safe mode.

Run Disk Utility multiple times and it says there is nothing wrong with the disk. Re-installed El Capitan from download, reset NVRAM, still no joy.

Customer did not have recent backup, but managed to copy user folder, and then restored from Time Machine backup from 2018. Still problems booting.

There are multiple logs in /Library/Logs pointing to a problem with Windowserver, and looking at /var/log/system.log there are a lot of lines after GPU debug info.

Any ideas? I can't get Hardware Diagnostics to start either with D or Option+D.

Booting with Command+V to get log files shows it getting as far as networking, and then swaps to a blank gray screen

I'd try to do a clean install of El Capitan to an external usb drive and start the diagnostic from there. Maybe some fixes became corrupted. If it boots without problems from the external disk, reinstall El Capitan over the macOS in the internal disk. It doesn't erase programs or files but will restore the operating system to the original state

 

[billymann]

I'd try to do a clean install of El Capitan to an external usb drive and start the diagnostic from there. Maybe some fixes became corrupted. If it boots without problems from the external disk, reinstall El Capitan over the macOS in the internal disk. It doesn't erase programs or files but will restore the operating system to the original state

Thanks guys. It was helpful