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My iMac 2017 27" died mid activity. The screen went black, the fan went nuts like a turbo jet. Then I forced it to shut down.

On re booting it remains black, the fan progressively goes insane but nothing shows. No apple logo or anything.

I have tried to run in safe mode but nothing, still black with intense fan.

I have tried reseting the nvram/PRAM but no luck.

The machine makes the start noise, the fan then goes nuts and nothing shows.

I've opened it up and giving it a good dusting with an air can too, no fortune sadly.

Has anyone else encountered this issue?

bmike
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HeyImArt
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  • What is a “black screen of death”? Do you mean the backlight is off or that the screen has failed entirely? Fans and blowers also don’t have much sanity. Do you mean the blower went high as part of the power on self test and never went back to idle? – bmike Aug 11 '22 at 17:15
  • "Black screen of death" is usually used to refer to a kernel panic which displays a message in white on a black background. This is in analogy to Windows' "blue screen of death" which used to be pretty common. But don't worry your description clears up any confusion. – Gilby Aug 11 '22 at 23:01

1 Answers1

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Yes, we have had machines fail in that manner. It is not common but can happen even to brand new macs.

The first thing to do is to try a safe boot. Then get out a flashlight and see carefully if the Apple menu or system is running and just the back light has failed.

Apple has a very nice set of instructions for when your machine fails to boot. Be sure to do all the steps in order. You will save a trip to a repair shop by being careful to perform the easy fixes first.

A safe boot is in the steps, so you don’t have to do that first if you’re going to follow the KB / FAQ on triage for this.

If your Mac won’t start and you have another Mac, place the iMac in target disk mode and check if you can repair the drive using First Aid in Disk Utility and possibly look at the system logs. You should be able to tell the last time it ran successfully looking at the date of /private/var/log/system.log and opening it in the console app from your MacBook or other working Mac.

Odds are you will need to back things up and then maybe attempt reinstalling the OS on top of the old iMac OS to make sure there’s no option other than a repair.

bmike
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  • Thank you for your response, I have tried those FAQs for the black screen unfortunately. I will try the torch approach to see, but would it be a back light issue even if the fan is going insanely fast? Which never happened before? – HeyImArt Aug 11 '22 at 17:25
  • It’s likely all symptoms at the same time are related. Could be a power supply failure if resetting the SMC one time doesn’t resolve the fan noise. – bmike Aug 11 '22 at 17:31
  • I'm going to reattach my screen, go through all of them again - try the flash flight too then I'll update here if nothing. – HeyImArt Aug 11 '22 at 17:32
  • Sadly no luck, I've tried the common faq steps, even used a flash light to see if anything is there from a back light problem. Nothing. It turns on with the start up sound, remains black yet the fan gets louder and louder – HeyImArt Aug 11 '22 at 17:42
  • Ok. Do you have a second Mac? – bmike Aug 11 '22 at 19:44
  • I have a Macbook – HeyImArt Aug 11 '22 at 20:45