Chosen Solution
Hey all from fixit I’ve recently encountered a problem with my iMac from 2009. It’s had the classic 1 TB of HD storage and 2 GB of RAM for 10 years now. A while back from when this was posted, the iMac had lines running up and down its screen. Assumed a GPU issue, but I didn’t do anything about it since it was technically still working. Now, the iMac boots into the Apple logo, but is EXTREMELY SLOW. I’m talking 10 minutes to boot halfway, only for it to shut down completely. I was assuming a thermal issue, but I used the “command + S” to bring up the built in bios coding, and has remained there for multiple hours while reformatting the drive. It has failed to do so numerous times. Now Command + R will not work either, not booting into anything. I have tried external drives, those have not worked either. I have no idea what to do.
See if it will boot in Recovery Mode by holding down the option key on start up. This sounds like a failing GPU to me. UPDATE 6/8/19 Your machine shipped with a system installation DVD, insert it, and boot up holding down the C key.
