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No good deed goes unpunished

J

Joshi83

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 30, 2011
17
0
Hey everyone,

At my work we have a 2011 mac mini running Lion up to date etc.
Its been lagging a bit with Photoshop and Premiere etc so I said to the boss I can bump it from 4gb ram to 8gb.

Followed the instructions as per the apple website and hey presto we had a snappy little mini.

Then after about an hour whilst browsing on Chrome we noticed every now and then the page wouldnt load and give a screen saying "Oh Snap" something happened but we dont know what, or something to that effect.
I thought it was our net but then after a while I got a full screen saying an error occurred and I have to restart the computer.

All seemed fine after a re-boot, then started getting those "Oh Snap" screens in Chrome and then the same Restart Computer message.
Other than that other programs had been running fine.

However this time it wont reboot. It gets to the grey screen, and a bar starts to load below, it loads 1/4 of the way across and then switches off.
I though, hmm bad ram so slotted the original ram back in but no luck. Can not get passed that load screen.

Iv booted into recovery mode and done a disk check, all good. Repaired permissions, all good. But will not boot.

Im out of luck does anyone know whats going on or had this before. Iv checked the rams seated properly. Have I stuffed something or has something else happened coincidentally at the same time?

If i cant get this sorted I can go for a trip to the genius bar (under warranty still) but id rather sort it myself in the morning because I'll never live it down at work for "breaking the mac"...

Help me!!
 
Did you put the old ram back in and verify the problem goes away? Possibly bad ram?
 
The OP stated he tried that already.

Try booting in verbose mode (command + v at startup) to see what's causing the boot issue.

Considering this issue happened just after upgrading your ram, it definitely must be related. Did you make sure you properly grounded yourself when you did the upgrade? I ask because if both your old and new ram are giving you problems, static electricity may have hurt them.

Try the apple hardware test to see if the ram sticks are still good.
 
adnbek said:
The OP stated he tried that already.

.
Click to expand...

Sorry missed that amongst the poor sentence structure and random line breaks.

What I can't figure out, is why the old RAM wouldn't even boot. Sounds like you didn't get the old RAM seated properly when you put it back in (or handled it improperly after removing it and ruined the old RAM).

The only other things I could think of is if you some how damaged the board when putting in the memory (i.e. used too much force, inadvertently pulled a wire, etc). I doubt this is the case though. When I replaced the RAM in my 2011, I wasn't exactly gentle (did it on my kitchen counter in a hurry).
 
Dust in the RAM slots? There is no reason the original RAM shouldn't function as it was originally...

Make a Linux live CD, boot to it, and try the memory test that shows up on the startup screen (you may have to press a key to see it). Plus using Linux makes you look even more knowledgeable than you are. :cool:
 
Ok took it to apple and the guy took it out the back for 10 mins, came back out said it was a software issue and its all good.
He didn't say anything about the ram so I guess it is fine. Will leave it a while till I attempt the 8gb upgrade again,let this smooth over lol

So yeah happy it's sorted but a little disappointed he didn't do whatever he did in front of me so I could share what it was but oh well.
Didn't loose any data either so he mustn't have reinstalled the OS? Would love to know now what he did. I was just too happy at the time and rushed back to work.
 
I can't remember where I read it, but it's a bug in Google Chrome of which the end result is an eventual kernel panic in OS X. Google is working on a temporary workaround for Chrome, but still ... an application issue should not cause an entire OS to crash in this day and age. With that in mind, I suspect Apple is most likely aware of the issue by now and working on some sort of way to address it on their end (and I would guess that the "Genius" has specific instructions from Apple on what to do to fix the issue until they can get a patch released, but for now it requires some sort of manual procedure that they did when they took your system into the back room for several minutes.)

In the meantime, I would switch to a different browser like Safari or Mozilla Firefox until such time that Apple and/or Google can get it fixed.
 
I think you might be onto something there duervo, browsing chrome today and starting to get that "aw snap" screen.
Switched back to safari and so far no issues at all...
 
Sooo, turned out the new ram was bad anyway.
I swapped the new sticks in and started to play up again, ran a ram test and failed almost straight away, so swapped back to the original and it's been solid all day, tested fine.
Weird...
 
How long did the Genius have it for? Enough time to back up and reinstall the OS?

If not, I'm putting my money on a simple PRAM and SMC reset. :)
 
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