Complete System Freeze - new iMac

[grinthock]

I've had it happen twice in 3 days (since I got the new iMac, 20")

Just doing whatever, various things running (only thing that's similar is i've had parallels running both times)

HARD crash -- what pisses me off is my old PowerMAC never did this....

When I say hard, I mean, Frozen video, no HDD movement, no crash message, just a totally frozen screen, with nothing happening... Holding power was the only solution.

Anyone else had this? Any thoughts?

 

[Muncher]

That is really odd. Is your mac overheating? Maye you have a bad memory stick?

 

[bembol]

Damn Intel's! LOL


Most thread I've read suggest that it may be the RAM Stick? My 17" 2.0GHz C2D iMac did this twice, Holding Down the Power Button was the only solution. The RAM shows everything is OK, it's been a while since it happened.

All the RAM in my iMac's are Kingston, my other iMac 2.0GHz 20" Core DUO and my new 24" 2.4GHz are running flawlessly.

 

[grinthock]

Overheating? I suppose maybe, the room is 18 degree centigrade, so I doubt it.

Bad memory? I had that though too, i'm considering running memtest86 on it, doing a full memory test. Also I may remove the ramstick and stick it into a laptop and hammer it.

 

[imacdaddy]

HARD crash -- what pisses me off is my old PowerMAC never did this....

Perhaps your PowerMac never did this because you never installed, and cannot install Parallels on PPC!

Seems like the bootcamp and parallels issues again...not the imac.

 

[grinthock]

Perhaps your PowerMac never did this because you never installed, and cannot install Parallels on PPC!

Seems like the bootcamp and parallels issues again...not the imac.

Except.... Here's where I question that.

If it was crashing my OS and I got the Mac crash screen that's one thing, it's a HARD lockup, similar to a hardware problem...

 

[*GG*]

I have a new iMac (24" 2.8ghz) and this has happened to me a few times as well. It happened when browsing iTunes videos, and also when in iMovie on another occasion.

It is very frustrating - the mouse works fine across the screen but nothing else works.

 

[mrgreen4242]

Have you run hardware test? Have you called AppleCare? Have you installed 3rd party RAM? Have you tried uninstalling Parallels/XP? What HAVE you done to try to solve/identify the problem? If you want help you need to at least try all the obvious stuff and then let us know how it goes... not just "I'm thinking about running Memtest86", actually run memtest and then report back in so we can put our collective thinking caps on...

Also, I'm guessing Paralells could cause a hard lockup like that, it must access a lot of the hardware in a pretty direct way especially the builds that have hardware 3d acceleration.

 

[Mac-Addict]

I know its basic but some people forget.. reset your PRAM?

 

[Craiger]

This happened to me the first or second night i got my new 2.4 20" and hasn't happened since... Oh I got mine the Thursday after they came out...

 

[dsnover]

Not really hard freeze

If you have remote login enabled, you can still login to the system, and then reboot. You will notice that the system isn't really frozen, but only the display is. Hopefully Apple will release a video driver fix for this issue...