i have an old imac, from 2011. over the course of the last few days, it's frozen up to the point where i'd have to reboot, set some processes to not start upon boot, and uninstall apps that were causing it to hang when i opened them (spotify, chrome).

starting yesterday, it would get stuck at boot up, where the apple logo is there with a progress bar. the bar would get all the way to the end and sit there.

i've looked around for solutions, from a disk repair (no good), restore from backup (can't even connect to time capsule) to a complete reinstall of the OS, which is next to impossible because the OS is capped out at High Sierra.

I've got quite a bit of music on there, and if I could get logged in to move most--if not all of it--to a hard drive, i'd be fine with tossing it in the trash.

any ideas?

Something similar happened to my brother's PC recently and it was because his hard drive had failed.

that's what i'm sure is happening here. i was just trying to recover what music i had on the hard drive before getting rid of it.

Not sure cause it's a Mac but if this were a PC I'd say try removing the hard drive from the machine and use a SATA to USB cable to access the drive on another machine and see if you can get to the data that way.

Yeah, I’d need to do some more research.

Good thinking tho.

A similar thing happened to my 2011-ish Macbook, and it wasn't a hard drive failure but a failure of the power connector that ran to the hard drive. It was a known issue, and I had it replaced twice--the 2nd time they did it for free even though my Apple Care had expired. Not sure if the same problem plagued iMacs at the time, but it might be worth looking into.

thanks guys. appreciate it.

I hope you soon see the return of the mac.

Also light some candles for St. Isidore of Seville