Five Yellow Bars (Won't Boot Up)

[SPBurke]

Have a 2009 Mac desktop I've been using since 2013. Go to boot it up today, and I see five yellow bars on the screen. Then the loading bar gets halfway before it stops, then shows me nothing but a white screen. I try to get into Recovery mode, and while I can see that fine there's five blue bars there. So far I haven't done anything because my Time Machine back-up is wildly out of date and I don't want to rock the boat too much.

Any idea what's going on? Did the graphics card bork or something? Granted this computer was getting long in the tooth and I was going to start preparing to replace it, but I would have at least liked to have gotten my files off it first. Please help.

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello and welcome.

Yes, it does sound like a probable logic board/graphics board issue. The hard drive is more than likely OK, but not guaranteed. If the graphics card is failing, it would cause the symptoms you are seeing, which would prevent OS X from fully loading.

Do you happen to have access to any other Macs with a FireWire port? You could then startup this Mac in Target Disk Mode, connect it to another Mac, and copy files from it to an external hard drive.

You could always take it to an Apple Store for diagnostics, but depending on the exact model (Early, Mid, or Late 2009), it could be vintage and non-repairable.

C