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Late 2007 iMac 20" Freezes completely random.

chemgolfer said:
Do you think the new SSD solved your problem? Or was it the simple removal and reinstalling of the ram and the clean out of the dust that did the trick?
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Not sure. It seems like every test eliminates all possibilities. I do know it made a drastic difference so far. I will continue testing the next few days and report back.

I did attempt a Mountain Lion DP3 install and it hung during install, which was concerning. but back into Lion and still no issues.

Can a developer try installing ML DP 3 and see if it hangs excessively (on a second, clean partition)
 
Detrius said:
That sounds like you had a bad hard drive. The fact that the replacement is an SSD is irrelevant.
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It isn't a bad hard drive. My own iMac as well as the others who have posted in this thread don't have bad hard drives. The problem is with the graphics kexts that where updated with 10.6.8 and not yet fixed as of 10.7.3.
 
Detrius said:
That sounds like you had a bad hard drive. The fact that the replacement is an SSD is irrelevant.
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I understand the fact that it is SSD is irrelevant. The fact is the computer was unusable before disassembled and became usable for a day for some reason. Still trying to connect the dots to find a pattern.

More inconsistencies... Today it started a freezing fit and froze about 3 times in 10 minutes. Not one time yesterday. It happened during boot - before the computer faded the wallpaper onto the screen when the screen was still white with the cursor in the upper left corner. It froze twice there. And one time loading VMware Fusion. I let the computer sit and came back a few hours later and it spewed crash information on the screen, and it did mention the 2400 kext. Not sure if it displayed that because verbosity was on during boot or what - it usually does not display that data on the screen when it crashes. I am going to continue testing and see if I can find anymore information.

So the consensus is anything after 10.6.6 will cause this?

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Intell said:
It isn't a bad hard drive. My own iMac as well as the others who have posted in this thread don't have bad hard drives. The problem is with the graphics kexts that where updated with 10.6.8 and not yet fixed as of 10.7.3.
Click to expand...

Are you sticking with 10.6.6 or dealing with the hangs on later version?
 
I will do some testing in the next few days if time permits. I will attempt to load the 10.6.6 kexts in 10.7.x and see if the machine will actually boot. If so, I will check the stability and functionality. Also, it would be interesting to see if the kexts from the 10.6.8 Combo Update will break 10.6.3, or another known good build.

Will post my results.
 
hope

Just a quick update, Still crashing. I have booked in at the genius bar in the local store. A guy I spoke to there understood the problem (I see some light at the end of this tunnel!) He said he had heard of it and that they are possibly doing fix for this. I will update you all when I have been in. I will go armed with all of the info from this thread!
 
simonh78 said:
Just a quick update, Still crashing. I have booked in at the genius bar in the local store. A guy I spoke to there understood the problem (I see some light at the end of this tunnel!) He said he had heard of it and that they are possibly doing fix for this. I will update you all when I have been in. I will go armed with all of the info from this thread!
Click to expand...

I hope it goes well. Just remember, it is not a hardware problem. Don't let them talk you into replacing the logicboard or the video card unless they completely pay for it.

Use logic, if it doesn't happen in 10.6.6 or lower, how can it be a hardware problem?
 
re. intel

Thanks Intel, I will not be pushed over. I have nursed this problem for way too long and I feel it is totally apples problem. I will not be paying a cent. The fact that you have pinned it down to one particular thing and the fact that apple have noted it as a known issue is a great starting point. My machine is almost useless today, so far I have had 7 crashes, I can't seem to find a log of them though? Any idea where to find this? It seems to just log random crashes.
Thanks again for your help.
 
Sometimes the crashes are logged to the kernel.log. You can view them by looking at them in the Console application. I've posted a crash log of one of my crashes in this thread so that you can see what they look like.
 
The latest

I took my machine to the apple store today. I saw one of the genius guys (not so sure about the name). He told me that this is not a known issue and apple have not recoded it as one. Hhmmm. He ran a few basic checks whilst I explained the background and I showed him all of the info that you have all come up with. I was told not to pay attention to forums and that they would have sold millions of the same machine and maybe 100 out of that million may have problems which does not constitute apple to make a fix. Hhhmmmm. He then told me the price of a replacement graphics card (about $265AUS). Ha ha, not likely!
I have left it with them overnight so that they can run a full diagnostic on the machine to see what they can come up with. I'd put money on it that they say "you just need a new graphics card/machine" So I'm sad to report that I don't hold any hope of getting this problem sorted. I have always owned and used apple but I'm really unhappy about this, to me it seems that they can outdate a perfectly good machine by making (or not) little changes here and there. Which then forces people to buy a new machine that will then be outdated again in a few years. NOT HAPPY.
 
A pity the Apple Geniuses have to stick to their script. I wonder how far they would have gone with replacing things until they "fixed" the problem. Did any of the checks or tests he ran on it come back showing a problem?

Maybe I should take mine in and ask the non-Genius lots of complex questions that have simple answers. Apple Tech vs Apple Genius. Who will win?
 
waste of time!

Ok so I got my machine back from apple. It got a complete clean bill of health, they ran several different tests and all was found to be fine... "So whats wrong?" I asked. To which they said its probably a software issue. Then I was told "ahh but we couldn't get the graphics card firmware to update, which means it needs a new video card and logic board". He did this backflip right in front of me! amazing. So as I guessed no solution was found, they did wipe my HD and update all drivers etc. I thought it couldn't hurt to let them do this, even though it has made zero difference. My machine is a little perkier but has crashed 4 times today so change. I think my next step is to contact apple direct and see what response I get. I did make a joke about apple not making a fix to sell new machines and the guy serving me said " well I would hope thats not the case" I think that is the case. I need to get through a pile of work so I will get that done then revert to 10.6.6 and see how that goes.
In short Apple your LAME!
 
Well he flat out lied to you about the firmware updating. If you have the same card/firmware as others have posted in here, Apple has never released a firmware update for our cards. Some ATI 2400 cards got updated. Mine as well as others posted in this thread don't have the correct revision of the card to get the update.
 
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back to the old system

Hello again, I decided to go back to 10.6.3 to see what its like. Surprise surprise it is all good. Not one crash so far. The only issue now is that Some things are a little buggy, what updates would you recommend to get to the best possible working platform without the crashing? I'm a photographer and I use CS4 (photoshop and bridge) every day, almost all day. I don't really care about any other programs, If I get it solid on these two apps then I can use my laptop for the other stuff. Thanks again!
 
Newbie questions

I did read these posts with great interrest because it really describes my problem with 10.6.8 since I upgraded to Snow Leopard in december 2011. I did a clean install to a new partition and applied the combo updater to 10.6.8.
Since then I have intermittend crashes showing the "** GPU Debug Info Start **" in the console. The UI interface is completely blocked, the mouse moves, but no action is taken.
Music on iTunes plays on until the song ends.

My 24" iMac is an early 2008 machine.
This machine kan either be equipped with the ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO or NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS. Obviously I have the ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO.

I have two questions:

1. What can I do to encourage Apple to really address this problem.
2. What is the best procedure to restore to the 10.6.6 kernel extension to get a stable system again.

TIA for any suggestions
 

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I also have suffered from this problem which began with the 10.6.3 update. I have a 20" early 2008 iMac w/ the ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO.

There is a fix that has worked for me every time there has been a Mac OS X update--re-installing the 10.6.2 kexts. I had to reapply them again after the most recent update, but it solved the problem as usual. I've been reapplying the kexts for every update since at least 10.6.4, and I am running the latest version of Lion with the old 10.6.2 kexts applied and it has been stable.

Here is the huge thread on apple.com that discusses the issue - I'm linking to the page that has the solution from KrzysiuTurek (scroll down to see his 1/10/11 post)

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2384136?threadID=2384136&start=300&tstart=0

I believe there were refinements/more detail to his suggestions later in the thread but since it is 73 pages long at the moment I can't easily find it without reading the whole thread, but before trying this solution, make sure you have a good backup and I would advise reading the whole thread (at least from the point linked to above) to make sure you understand the risks and know what you're doing and to be sure you get the right kexts for your machine.

Good luck! I hope it works for others. It worked for me. FYI: occasionally when I run Kext Helper to do the fix, it will apply the kexts and give me the message that everything looks good, cross your fingers and reboot, then Kext Helper becomes unresponsive and crashes, but on reboot everything works fine.

I have reported the freezes to Apple on several occasions, as have many in the thread I linked to, but so far the issue has never been fixed. It's very frustrating, but at least there is a workaround.
 

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Just an update from what I have experienced as of late.

I am thoroughly convinced is a heat issue or hardware breakdown of some sort. I believe that the newer drivers beyond 10.6.6 and into 10.7.x must tax the video card/GPU slightly more (perhaps the clock rate was adjusted) which causes the video card to heat up and causing it to fail. After it cools off, it returns to being stable.

My reasoning: It seems that I experience most hangs after I have performed OS maintenance on the iMac, whether that is installing the latest version of Mountain Lion, or installing a new build of Windows 8. During the installation of an alternate OS, particularly Windows (and probably *nix as well) the system does not cool the same way it does when the chipset drivers are installed therefore gets very very warm to the point the fans speed up.

I installed the release preview of Windows 8 yesterday from DVD, and after installation on the first boot, the fans were spinning pretty fast. After logging in, I was able to work in Windows for about 5 minutes, and the entire LCD went black. The backlight went out as well, and the computer was unresponsive (I didn't try accessing it from the network). The Caps Lock key would toggle on and off. So this appeared to be a video card driver crash. I could not get it to stay up long enough to install Boot Camp drivers (so I don't know if they would work with Windows 8 yet) but in a nutshell, it was pretty much unusable. After several reboots, the result was the exact same. The computer would boot into Windows, and within 5 minutes the screen would just blank out. For about 3 seconds before this happened, the UI was unresponsive.

Even though this behavior is different than what we are seeing with OS X, it was video related, so I thought I would boot into 10.7.4 on the other partition and see if it would hang. It had not hung in two days and the computer had been on with sleep turned off and display sleep turned off (not sure if this matters). Immediately after booting, I could open Safari and as soon as I did it would hang. I repeated this about 5 times until I decided it just was not going to work. I installed 10.6.0 after that on a separate partition, and it has not hung yet. Afterwards, I went into Lion and so far it has not hung either.

The temperature that these OSs run is very evident on notebooks - OS X has much longer battery life, better power management, and less heat generation etc., than Windows. I think it is the same on the iMac, however the battery life aspect is moot.

If this was affecting all 2007 iMacs, I believe we would hear more about it (although there are several complaints here and other forums) but I wonder if it could be thermal paste related on the GPU. Clearly once it starts (from my experience) it will continue to hang consistently within one or two minutes after starting in Lion. So it appears the system is not accepting the new driver due to heat issues.
 
I'm very sure it isn't a heat or overworking issue. Reasoning, I've had my iMac encoding DVDs 24x7 for 3 weeks in late 2011 after I first started noticing this problem. I was running 10.6.6 while encoding and had the fans at the default minimum speeds. Never had a heat issue or overheating.

As for overworking, I play games in Boot Camped Windows XP with the fans at the default and have yet to have a problem with XP crashing. Even when playing games in Paraellels or VM Fusion with XP, no problems as long as the system has the 10.6.6 extensions. As soon as the extensions are updated to 10.6.7 or higher, crashing starts. Even from a cold boot and fans at the maximum.
 
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