iMac freezes after fresh install of SL or L. Motherboard or HD issue?

C

cunningo

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my 24 inch alum iMac from late 2007 never had any problems. In the past few months I've upgraded to Snow Leopard (which was fine for about a month) and I've also upgraded the 2 GB of RAM to 4GB (Crucial 2x2 DIMM with Hynix chips). The RAM gave me problems and I had to have Crucial swap them out.

I then reinstalled the OS, even zeroed out the hard drive instead of just erasing the old copy. First of all, the installs often fail at some point and I have to start them all over again. Finally when I can get an install to go through, the OS works fine, but then after a few minutes it freezes and I get the beach ball. After that sometimes the ball itself just freezes and I have to do a hard restart.

The people at Apple suggested it was the HD so I just installed a new WD caviar black drive yesterday and the problems still persist. Since I've already tried to install Leopard and Snow Leopard separately, I'm beginning to think that it's one of two problems:
1--optical drive is faulty, which is causing immediate corruption of the system files
2--motherboard is faulty

I was thinking of trying to boot the OS from an external drive with an os x image on it. if that doesn't work, I'd assume its the motherboard.

Does anyone have any tips?
 
I'd drop it back down to the original 2GB of RAM configuration with the original chips and try it from there. Those things do have optical drive/optical cable issues, but mostly not reading disks or optical will be dead altogether. Otherwise start disconnecting peripherals (i.e. airport card, sound board, optical drive, etc..) and go by process of elimination. Have you thought about running Apple hardware test?
 
I am actually running the original RAM (the 2, 1 GB hynix chips that came with the machine), and after replacing them I reset the PRAM as well. I did disconnect the peripherals and the power as well.

I did not completely run the hardware test yet. I will try that shortly. Is the hardware test comprehensive (I will run the extended version) or is it just a memory test?
 
Its not as comprehensive as the Apple Service diags available to service providers, but it will check more than just the RAM. You could also create yourself an UBCD4W (ultimate boot CD for Windows) and run memtest which does a good job of testing RAM.
 
so the mac extended hardware test just finished and it found no trouble, which I'm very happy about, but I still don't know what could be causing the problems.

I've actually run Memtest before for 5 passes and it found no problems.

I was thinking about creating an image of the install disk and putting it on an old ipod and wiping the system. If the problem is an optical drive, then presumably that would clear it up. It could be a bad OS disc from Apple, but I tried running a clean install of Leopard as well and that also didn't work very well.
 
just finished the apple hardware test, extended, and it reported no problems. Now I was thinking of doing a clean install of SL from an image of the install disc put onto an external drive. I'm thinking that I could definitively isolate whether or not the optical drive is a problem.

I've tried Memtest in the past for testing memory, and even after a 5 pass test, it came back good.

Does anyone have any other thoughts of things that I'm missing in my troubleshooting?
 
Hi there. Ive been facing the same problem as you for a month now. Can you tell me if you came up with a solution with it? Thanks
 
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