Re-installing and looking for good news

[Steven DeWitt]

Hello,

My new Intel iMac crashed after 3 months with no warning. The  
symptoms were all bad: circle with line through it or flashing file  
folder with question mark on startup, unable to start in safe mode,  
unable to start in command mode, Disk Utility unable to repair OS X,  
and I could not mount my iMac as an external drive. I did  
troubleshooting on the phone with an Apple rep and we determined that  
I would have to reinstall OS X. I waited and purchased DiskWarrior so  
that I could attempt to rescue some files before reinstalling, and I  
was able to rescue files. Today, I erased the hard drive and re- 
installed OS X, started OS X successfully, and immediately downloaded  
and installed all software updates. Now, on restarting the computer,  
it has been sitting on the blue screen with the rotating circle for  
about 90 minutes. Is it normal for it to take this long to start  
after installing major OS X updates, or has something bad happened  
again?

At wits' end,

Steven