IMac display gone wonky and doesnt load

[slippyjim]

Hi,

My sister knocked her iMac off the desk and now its behaving a bit odd...
A1419 EMC 2639
iMac 27" Late 2013 model
There is no visible damage to the screen or any part of the iMac
She has many unbacked up photos on this Mac.

When she turned it on it displayed a screen like this and wouldnt go any further and it also did not do the startup chime.
It looks to me like its the Apple logo and the progress bar gone all squiggly.

I then turned it on at my house and I got the same screen and no startup chime but then it did go on to a screen displaying

"Unapproved Caller.
SecurityAgent may only be invoked by Apple Software"

The screen was perfect with no cracks, lines or any other distortion.

I clicked Ok and it straightaway took me back to the same screen, I clicked OK again and this time it took longer - around 4 or 5seconds and then back to the same screen. This always happens

Then I tried resetting the NVRAM and as I was doing that the startup chime returned but still same initial screen

Then I tried recovery and that loads fine, screen again perfectly fine.
I ran a "repair disk" and it said it was ok, it didnt take very long at all
Then I tried repair disk permissions, it found some errors so i thought I would try repair disk again but this time it said it couldn't unmount the disk.

Any ideas on what could be the problem and how to proceed from here?

Thanks

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello and welcome.

Sorry for the delayed response.

Initial thought is that the hard drive may have been damaged in the fall, especially if the iMac was powered on. If so, it could have only affected the Mac OS volume and the Recovery Partition may still work.

The best thing to do would be to try and startup from an external drive with OS X/macOS on it, and see if you can access the hard drive/files that way.

Did she happen to have FileVault enabled?

C