my friend has a 15 inch 2011 imac pro. in the last few days she uploaded 2000 or so photos to it from her iphone. the next time she tried to wake it from sleep she got a circle/slash icon (prohibitory symbol) on her screen which, i understand, indicates that the operating system found on the machine is not one that this mac can use. there have been no previous problems with the machine, which is running a fairly recent os (later than mtn. lion).

i tried opening it with the shift key held down after the startup chord, to no avail. i tried booting with a tiger installation disk, holding down the “d” key, again to no avail. now I can’t get the disk out.

she cannot find her backup drive, but is still looking for it.

will the machine boot from an os installed on a jump drive? if so, any special tricks? What if I load an os on an external hard drive—any special tricks to boot?

i’ll appreciate any assistance.

Early 2011 needs Snow Leopard boot, or later, Late 2011 needs Lion, or later boot (though IIRC, SL w/ updated Lion video drivers will work).
IOW, Tiger won't work.
Try again. Proper thumb drive will work. Good luck.
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If you have a sufficiently recent OS installed (10.10 or later, maybe even 10.9?), there should be a recovery partition on your machine that you can use to fix HD errors and/or reinstall the Mac OS in your main partition.

Start up with Command - R pressed down and it will force a start from that recovery partition. Disk Utility should be available in there (I forget the actual screens available to you). Check your disk first and maybe try a regular restart if it finds and fixes errors.

If not, do the Command - R thing again and reinstall Mac OS. It retains your data should allow you to log back in as your regular user again. Even if it makes you make a new user on the machine, choose a different user name and then once back at the Desktop, go to //Users/*oldusername* to retrieve your data.

Attach a USB mouse, hold the button down when booting and the DVD should eject. Her hard drive may be too full. Boot from an external and move some of her photos to it.

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

well, i jumped the gun a bit. i booted holding down option+command+r and got a screen giving me osx utilities with options to restore from time machine backup, reinstall os x, get help online and open disk utility.

i chose disk utility and was able to eject the tiger install disk and then chose first aid for the startup disk, but the only non-ghosted button was verify disk. verify disk tells me that the disk appears to be ok, but that:

"invalid node structure
"invalid sibling link
"the volume was found corrupt and needs to be repaired
"file system check exit code is 8
"error: the disk needs to be repaired. click repair disk."

the disk repair button, verify disk permissions and repair disk permissions buttons are all ghosted.

is the drive hosed? other possible solutions?

tia.

Run Diskwarrior.

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

Sounds like at least Lion, 10.7.x was on the machine. That Tiger 10.4 disc, waon't work.
Glad you got at least a bit of a jump start.
Good luck, hope the disk is repairable, otherwise time for new disk, maybe option up to a SSD.
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Try a Command - R reboot again and do the disk utility repair again, you might get normally accessible Repair Disk buttons. If I really wanted that disk back in it's previously working order, I might try that 5 or 6 times.

However, Speedy has the simplest solution - DiskWarrior.

Quote
goodmanx
my friend has a 15 inch 2011 imac pro. ...

I am confused (and tired). is it about a MacBook pro like subject says, or in iMac/ iMac Pro did not exist in 2011

"d" is the wrong key... its "option"

Id say the drive is just hosed. Even if it wasnt, Id never trust it again.

Great candidate for a SSD

Goal would be to get it started from an external drive, see if drive comes up, and if it does transfer everything off ASAP. Jump drive or external will work, but jump drive will be painfully slow.

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Edited 999 time(s). Last edit at 12:08PM by jdc.

thanx for all the thoughtful responses! i did do another command+r reboot, opened disk utility was successful in getting disk repair to operate and found that she's using 319.19 gigs of the 310.21 gigs available on the drive (18.9 *mb* of space available), so disk repair doesn't even have enough space to do it's thing. well, duh!

we're hopeful that her when-found backup drive has an os on it and that we can boot from that, then deal with getting the mass of stuff off the internal drive, etc. if not, then i'll install a suitable os on my 4tb drive, boot from there and move the excess baggage to it.

any other thoughts or suggestions will be welcome.

thanx, again, for your esteemed counsel, y'all!

just one more thing, sir (said lt. columbo): will disk warrior work on a bloated drive like this? would i just buy the disk and boot from it?

disk warrior doesnt come on a CD anymore... AFAIK, download only. And IMHO, a waste of $. Problem seems simple, she tried to overfill the drive.

Again, Id copy the data off and install a 500 GB SSD, $60

[www.amazon.com]

In addition to giving her 180 GB more space -- its 10X faster than her current drive. Will make it feel new.

Super simple: [eshop.macsales.com]

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Edited 999 time(s). Last edit at 12:08PM by jdc.

I agree, buy another drive, install an OS on the new drive, boot from it and use Migration Assistant to move everything.

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

Quote
goodmanx
just one more thing, sir (said lt. columbo): will disk warrior work on a bloated drive like this? would i just buy the disk and boot from it?

DW comes on a flash drive... But requires some free contiguous disk space to build a new directory.

Replace the boot drive. 2.5-inch SSD is a good option.

Could try migrating from the old drive after installing an OS on the new drive, but odds are that a lot of stuff on the old drive has been corrupted at this point. A drive that old probably has hardwae issues, too. Would set up the new drive from scratch and try copying just the user's data-files over from the old drive.

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I have an older version (maybe v4?) of diskwarrior on CD (or is it DVD?). I'd probably sell it to you if you want it. PM me if interested.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/23/2019 07:24AM by clay.

I keep thinking you're working on an iMac. Stupid brain.

Do exactly what jdc posted.