Unfortunately, this problem persists, rendering my iMac unusable.
Things I've tried:
- Brought my iMac to the Genius Bar and they ran it for 2 days without incident.
- Ran the basic hardware diagnostic tests and encountered no issues.
- Ran the extended hardware diagnostic tests and encountered no issues.
- Ran a multi-pass RAM test with no problems detected.
- Ran it with some alternate RAM and it crashed.
- It's now cooler in my house, so heat shouldn't be a factor.
- Tested the drive with FirstAid without an issue.
- Re-installed MacOS and upgraded to High Sierra -- still crashes after the upgrade.
- Restored from a TimeMahine backup.
For awhile my system ran for about a week, then finally crashed. The other day, after performing an extended diagnostic test and rebooting, it crashed again on boot-up after entering my password.
When I search the logs in Console.app, I don't see any matches related to "kernel panic" so I'm inclined to believe that perhaps this isn't the cause, but the logs in the Console.app are so extensive that I'm not sure what else I should be looking at.
So I'm kinda at a loss. I'm starting to wonder if maybe it's a software issue. I suppose I could backup everything, wipe the machine, and re-install High Sierra, then incrementally re-install the stuff that I need. My concern there is the potential loss of things like my Photos library, but I suppose I'd always have the TimeMachine backups. Woudl I be able to selectively restore individual things like that rather than performing a full restore?
I've got another Genius Bar appointment scheduled, but I'm not sure that they're likely to uncover anything new.