iMac confused after power outage
by Volker Weber
Ute tells me we had a power outage. While the servers are backed up by a UPS, Lucy was shut down. Ute says, she cannot start the machine since it is looking for a wireless keyboard. I assume it cannot find the USB attached keyboard. Suggestions anyone?
Comments
Try booting off the system restore CD (hold down C key on the USB keyboard with the disc in the drive) and run the disk repair utility to repair the drive. Sounds like something got corrupted in the power outage.
Perhaps reset the PRAM.
Can you boot into the firmware monitor? (Command-Option-O-F)
Volker, I meant, of course, can you use the USB keyboard to get into the firmware monitor? If not, then you're likely stuck zapping the PMU using the reset button. You can find a location for the button at http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~dgolden/reset.jpg
Unplug the machine, then push once.
If the USB keyboard responds to input, then you can also get at the hard disk through another machine using firewire target disk mode, perhaps - but I don't know what you should do then.
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What does "cannot start the machine" EXACTLY mean?
imac should start without keyboard, no problem.
As Andy and David suggest, repairing the hard disk should do the trick and could be done also firing up the firewire mode however, whatever you do, you need initial keyboard access, at least at startup...
Is this not available?
Thank you for your suggestion. I will tell you what I find out about the machine when I am back in the office.
The USB bus was dead. Switching off Lucy via the power button did not help. Then I unplugged all cables and re-connected only power and keyboard. She booted just fine and I reconnected all other devices. Now she is no longer confused. :-)
