Stuck on grey screen at boot up

I've got a 20-inch 2.4GHz iMac, purchased Oct. 2007, running OS X 10.5.1

I had a problem before where I was unable to drag and drop icons, folders, or even move mail in Entourage. What fixed it before was simply booting from the OS disk and repairing disk permissions, and repairing the disks. I'm sort of new to Mac's (and Leopard in particular) so I'm not real sure what it fixed or what could have caused the issue to begin with.

Well today, I did a fresh install of Leopard (the system just wasnt running right after installing 2007-009 1.1 update). So, installed the OS, completed updates (minus the 2007-009), installed my applications, and everything was moving smoothly. Well, I installed my printer (Canon Pixma iP4500, which was working fine in the prior OS install) and things were still moving smoothly. About an hour after that, I get the same occurence of the earlier issue with not being able to drag and drop icons or anything.

SO, I put in the install disk, rebooted, held down C-key to boot from the disk, the drive sounded like it was spinning up, then stopped, spinned again, then spit the disk out, and booted into the OS. So I tried again, but this time held down the Option key, and chose to boot from the disk. The drive would spin and spin and spin, but never boot to the disk. I powered the machine off, and upon reboot, it just hangs at the grey screen. I get the OS start up sound, but after that nothing. Machine wont even boot into safe mode. What options do I have, other than calling Apple? Any other way to try and get this thing to boot?

 

Try resetting PRAM, and/or reinstalling the OS.

If you call Apple, they'll just tell you to do the same thing. At least that's what happened to me.

 

Yep, I did some more searching and found another thread in here and just reset the PRAM. It worked! I'm typing on the iMac now. Whew!! Oh, and I'm also able to drag and drop again now

 

x) Good to hear that it's fixed!