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The iMac G5, powered by the PowerPC G5 processor, was originally released in August 2004.

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Mac won't start up after being knocked over...

Long story short, my computer was knocked over by my daughter, and now wont load. When I power up it chimes and goes to a white screen, then shows a blue screen with a smiling file in the center. I tried reloading the start up disks, but there is no destination drive to choose from. Also there's a wierd clicking noise after the chime when the hard drive starts spinning. Is there anything else that would cause this problem, or is it just the hard drive?

Answered! View the answer I have this problem too

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Do you know what system you are running? Does the icon look like this? Try starting up holding down the shift key,

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Yea, it's that image then it changes from a "?" to a smiling face. When I restarted holding shift, it came up with a message that says:

Panic(CPU0): unable to find driver for the platform "POWERMAC 8,1"

I was still running the original OS X 10.3.9 on it.

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The folder with the question mark means your system can't find a bootable system. The drop may have damaged the system. Try starting up from your system installation disk by inserting the disk and restarting holding down the "C" key. Go to the second screen pull down menu to Utilities -> Disk utility, select your drive on the left and repair the drive till it runs clear. Now try to start up.

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Tried to load with the disks, and there was no destination drive

to choose

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Did you use disk utilities first as I stated in the comment on my answer?

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Check to make sure that the cables are still plugged into the motherboard and hard drive. If you look just under the hard drive bays you should see where the sata cables plug into the board. Make sure that the hard drive is spinning up as well. You can turn on the tower with the outside, aluminum cover off. If all seems plugged in and it still doesn't find your drive, try swapping to the other set of hard drive cables in the tower.

Update

Just realized that you are on an iMac. If you hear clicking then it is most likely the hard drive. If you have the discs, does it allow you to boot from them? If so, boot off of the discs. Once booted from the discs launch disk utility and see if your internal drive shows up in the list on the left. If it does you may still be able to recover the data off of the drive by using a spare firewire drive to install the system and boot off of. If you need instructions for this post here and I will try to help.

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yea, i tried to boot from the disk but it didnt show the hard drive on the list, only the disk. i just bought a new drive and luckly there were no other problems. thanks for your help.

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Tried to load with the disks, and there was no destination drive

to choose

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hi, repaired a couple of similarly treated imacs..

if you dorp your imac than the heat sensor on the hard drive may become detached then the the HD frys very quickly.

A couple of machines just teh Hd read head tore into media destroying disk.

basicaly a knocked over imac usually means new hard drive, upgrade the size of drive when you change and always have an external back of your data..

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jack, did you read the comment directly above you?

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