Can't get my iMac to boot up

I'm in desperate need of some help. My iMac would not respond when trying to click anything so I forced restart by holding the power button. Not I can not get the computer to get past the white boot screen. Orignally the apple symbol is there and no I get what I've attached below

My work is on an external but what worries me the most is that my personal wedding photos from friends and family are on the system drive. They were on a external, but I need to move them off to reformat the drive. Now I'm afraid of doing anything to reboot the system in fear of wipping the drive.

I hope someone has a solution that will fix my computer and hopefully not wipe my hard drive. I'd appreciate any suggestions. Thank you.

You can try booting with holding down the option key. If there is a recovery partition that can actually boot, your drive is probably OK for now.

You can do a SMC reset by unplugging the power, and then holding down the power button for a few seconds. Then plug back in.

The SMC reset did not work, though there was a glimmer of hope using the option key method. I had 2 pictures of hard drives show up. One said Macintosh HD I believe and the other one said recovered 10.9. There was an arrow underneath the Mac hd but the arrow keys, mouse, and enter key would not click anything. The computer then went back to the original problem. Do you have any ideas on how to choose recovery?

I was able to recreate it and without letting go of option I was able to choose recovery. Unfortunately I'm still only getting the apple loading screen

the arrow keys can toggle it.

When holding down option the entire time I was able to toggle to recovery 10.9. Unfortunately it still gets stuck on the loading screen. Are there any other options I could try in hopes of getting the computer back up?

Good news bad news,

The bad news, your drive is likely failing, stop trying to use it now.

Good news, like in the Princess Bride, it's only mostly dead. Meaning you can probably get it recovered relatively easily while it is still working.

You can try hooking it to another mac using target disk mode. If not, take it to an Apple store if you can.

This may be too late to be helpful, but, if you're still trying to get it going and pull data from the HD you could also try booting into Safe mode.
Here's a link to Apple's instructions and info about Safe Mode (short procedure & description)

support.apple.com/kb/HT1564?viewlocale=en_US

With the iMac powered off;
1 Power on iMac
2 When you hear the chime, immediately press and hold Shift key.
3 Keep holding Shift just until you see the gray apple and spinning progress gear underneath.

I will try using target disk mode while hooking it up to my wife Macbook Pro, does the type of connection matter?

I will also try booting into Safe mode and see if I can extract my data that way.

Thank you both for the suggestions, I will try these both tonight. If neither work I'll probablly have to go to the Apple store to see if they can recover the files, but it seems like no matter what I'll have to lay out some $ for a new computer... Not something I was looking forward to in the immediate future.

Thanks again.

Just a new system drive.
ALWAYS have backups.

Is install and setting up a system drive something that can be done on my own or something I need to bring to an apple store?

Depends on the iMac model, and if the Apple store will do it under warranty or not.

Few dead drives give up much data once they won't boot.

But the Apple store will troubleshoot it and give an estimate for free.

Could also be a bad GPU circuit in the iMac, that will produce this symptom, also. Let them troubleshoot before doing anything else.

It's a late 2009 iMac so I would doubt there any chance at a warrenty. I'll have to take it there and see what they say.

Hey Ben

The fact that both his recovery partition and his boot drive show up on the boot selection screen is a very good sign he can get his data back.

To do this, you will need a firewire 800 cable to get into target disk mode. If your wife's computer only has thunderbolt, you will need the thunderbolt to FW800 adapter.

A backup drive with enough room for the data you want to save.

Data Rescue 3 or 4, if you can't access the data in target disk mode.

To boot into target disk mode, boot while holding down the T key, and then you will see a "nuclear fallout" looking symbol floating around the screen.

If your system drive mounts on your wife's MBP, copy all the data you can to the backup drive.

Once you get your data back, you can take it to Apple where it's still within their five year window of flat rate parts and repair.

Looking at the iFixit guide, it's a pretty big repair to swap out the drive on your own. If you go that route and do it yourself, I would take the opportunity to put in an SSD. It will give it a new life.

So after a few attempts I got the computer in target disk mode each time but was not able to mount the drive. Disk Utility showed it, but was not able to mount it.

You mentioned Data Rescue 4, do you have experience with it? I'm not sure how it is able to pull the files from my mac?

www.prosofteng.com/downloads/

I have had some good luck with it, however, once a drive is not mounting, and it is indeed hardware related, the more you run the drive the more damage you can be causing it. You may want to stop using it and take it to apple and see what they say. They won't charge you for that.

If Data Rescue can see the drive, it performs a slow scan of the drive and begins looking for files. The free trial can do a scan, and recover one file.

Then if it can see your files, you can buy it and activate it, the scan it did will work. The best way is to clone the drive to a disk image using Data Rescue, this does the least amount of wear on it, then it recovers the files from the cloned image.

Good luck!

I made an appointment to bring the computer to my local Apple store to see if they can extract the data. If they can't, I'll try the program you suggested. Here's to hoping it's all recoverable!

Thanks