OK, I have recently acquired a broken iMac (A1200, C2D 2.16, 2006), which:
Will not boot OSX
Will not boot the OSX install CD (Leopard, 10.5)
Will not successfully boot any linux livecd's, for numerous reasons
Will not boot the Win7 Home Premium disc
When trying to boot the OSX install cd in verbose mode, it goes through startup fine, and then boots to a light-blue screen with a messed up cursor in the upper left corner. When holding down shift (safe mode), it just clicks and turns off after about a minute of the mac os x boot screen.
When trying to boot the OSX install on the HDD (250gb sata), in verbose mode it says "disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED)", then it hangs at the point right after it says "AirPort_Brcm43xx: Ethernet address <mac address>". When booting into safe mode it has the same problem as the install disc. (it turns off after about a minute)
On the HDD install, I can boot into single user mode, and run "fsck -fy", and it gets the "disk0s2: 0x0e0030005 (UNDEFINED)" error, and then says "Invalid node structure (4, 22902) ** Volume check failed."
I have reset the PRAM/NVRAM numerous times, and the only other problem that I can see is lots of dead pixels, but those should not affect the boot process.
Any help would be appreciated.
[EDIT] Don't care about anything on the HDD, as I need to wipe it anyway, but cant boot into linux to do that [/EDIT]
OK, so I have worked on the machine for a while, and here's what I've found:
-The optical drives seem to be incredibly expensive for their purpose (>$70)
-I tried to boot some discs I had laying around, and here's what booted: An Xubuntu 7.10 disc, an Ubuntu 9.04 disc, the OSX Leopard Upgrade DVD, and the OSX 10.4 install CD 1. A Fedora DVD would partially boot then hang. Note that these discs only boot after leaving the machine off for hours, and only boot sometimes after that.
-When I booted into the leopard DVD, and opened disk utility (as I could not install, due to not having 10.4 on the machine previously), the SMART status of the HDD was "Failing". The ODD had nothing obvious wrong with it.
-I booted into the diagnostic included with the 10.4 disc, and everything was detected fine. After running the extended tests, the machine reported no errors.
I have a local place I know where I might be able to source a cheap optical drive, but might something else other than the HDD be causing the failure to boot as well?
The HDD shouldn't be keeping it from booting, unless it was causing it to overheat... (the upper-left corner feels warmer to the touch, but the rest is normal)
