Stuck in Kernel Panic

[jclink]

Hello all, I'm a new face here and have been fortunate enough to never really need support, however at this point, I'm completely lost-

I use a 24" 3.06 ghz iMac with 4gb of ram (All installed at the Apple Store) and 8800GS graphics card.

Now to my problem, I was watching a Youtube video in full screen today when suddenly the video stuttered and then the screen went black it looked like it tried to come back but I decided to hard reboot. At that point when it came back up I received the Kernel Panic reboot error. I went ahead and rebooted and it continued to come up. Out of curiosity I tested booting into my boot camp drive, and was able to get into windows fine.

So- I went ahead and put in my install disk. Booting to the install disc 'c' or via 'option' brought me right back to the Kernal Panic. I did a 'd' to go into diagnostics from the disk and that did work. Diagnostics found no hardware errors.

I also had an install of OSX on my backup drive and once again found that booting into it results in a Kernal Panic.

I've tried resetting PRAM and SMC neither of which also worked.

But again the weirdest thing is that I CAN boot into Windows. I'd be happy to reinstall as I have a recent Time Machine backup, but I just can't even get to the install disk.

Anyone have suggestions?

 

[Giaguara]

The diagnostics works better in looped mode (ctrl+L) and running extended test for hours - especially if suspecting a RAM related issue.

What is the panic code you see? Does it throw a specific error on the screen?

Can you boot to safe mode? (hold down shift after the startup chime in the beginning until you see login screen)

 

[djackmac]

I've had these iMacs in having issues with Video cards, HDs, optical drives, and optical drive cables. I've already replaced at least a few of all of the above mentioned on these machines. And yes, any one of these components being flaky will cause kernel panics regardless of what media you are trying to boot to. The hardware test won't test the video card and flaky video cards will rarely show any symptoms booted to AHT because the graphics requirements needed to run AHT are minimal. If you say you can boot to Windows, go to Windows and really play around with the screen resolution and stream some video and see if it freaks out again.