Help Please! :S

Hi Everyone.
I have an iMac, and recently over the past about 3 days the screen has been turning grey, and a message box appearing saying that I must turn of the computer and re start it.
I am not sure what this is, and can't find any advice on the Apple website or anywhere else online - hence why I have come here!
This has happened about 4-5 tomes over the past about 3 days, and it is starting to worry me slightly.

Any help would be really greatly appreciated!

Thank you!

Its called a kernal panic, basically the OS has crashed.

What version od OSX are you running?

Hello

Hi There!

Thanks for the reply.

Would you be able to advise as to what steps I should take from now to fix this?

Thanks.

Running Snow Lepoard by the way!

chrisrhandley said:

Would you be able to advise as to what steps I should take from now to fix this?

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Have you upgraded the computer in some way recently...like installed new software or hardware (ram, hard drive, etc.)?

- Nick

No - have not installed anything at all. The only thing I can think of being the problem was having an unexpected power-cut the other day. Should that make any difference?

chrisrhandley said:

No - have not installed anything at all. The only thing I can think of being the problem was having an unexpected power-cut the other day. Should that make any difference?

Click to expand...

Always possible. If the power-outage you had the other day caused a problem (unlikely...but always possible)...if the hardware got damaged in some way...that could cause the kernel panics.

Kernel panics MANY times are hardware related...and in many of these cases it's due to "bad ram". That's why I was asking if you had done any upgrading recently.

But to be honest...solving kernel panics can be very difficult (especially if you have done nothing to the computer in terms of upgrades). If the computer has always run fine (for weeks, months, years)...and no upgrades of any sort have been done to it recently...then this would lead me to believe that something more serious has gone wrong with the hardware (some sort of spontaneous hardware failure).

Now if something recently has been done to this computer (which is why I asked above)...then that change/upgrade could point us into a direction to investigate.

- Nick

Hi Again.

Thank you for your advise.

The only thing I have changed over the last few days, was download 3 Safari additions (eg: add blocker), but doubt if that could have made any difference.

I was thinking the oher day, that the computer was running extremly slowly, especially on start-up, and have been looking into upgrading RAM, but have not done so as of yet.

I don't know if this will make any difference as well, but any automatic time-machine backups over the past day or so have failed. Could this indicate a possible hard disk failure?

Thanks for any further help and advice you are able to give on this issue.

Please try repairing your hard drive, using one of the three methods here:
Resolve startup issues and perform disk maintenance with Disk Utility and fsck

Hello

Where it says 'Try Disk Utility', does it mean the original disks that came with the computer, or the most recent OSX (E.G. Snow Leopard) ?

Use the Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.

USe the Snow Leopard disc as you cannot repair a drive you are booted from. Pop in the disc, reboot and hold down 'C' immediately after the chime, go to Utilities in the Menu bar, Select Disk Utility > Repair Disk and see what is reported.

USe the Snow Leopard disc as you cannot repair a drive you are booted from. Pop in the disc, reboot and hold down 'C' immediately after the chime, go to Utilities in the Menu bar, Select Disk Utility > Repair Disk and see what is reported.

Click to expand...

I have done this, and there were about 5 problems that were in red, and at the end of it, it said that all had been repaired successfully.

The kernel panic has happened about twice more since the disk repair. Any ideas now?!

If this is any help, whenever Time Machine tries to back up, it fails, and then I get the kernel panic?!

Thanks.

Can't help with TM personally prefer SuperDuper as a backup which is bootable. Is TM being installed on an external drive? If so with the drive connected, go into Disk Utility in Utilities, highlight it and run Repair Disk and see what is reported. It may be that the external, if any, is failing, causing these problems.

HDD can be faulty even when received brand new. Several reasons for this including handling, storage and even quality control in China where most are manufactured.

Hi.

Ok will run the repair disk on the external Time Machine drive, and see what happens. Thanks!