Intel iMac keeps freezing, lagging and shutting down.

Question

My iMac has for the past week or so repeatedly frozen, sometimes leading to it showing a blue screen forcing me to shut it down.
When I then try to turn it back on, it doesn't load. However, a Safe Boot and HD restore fixes the problem temporarily. The computer works ok, with a bit of a lag sometimes. But as soon as I open too many apps, or sometimes just for no real reason at all, it just freezes and stays that way. This means I can't really use my computer for much else other than ubrowsing the web. Programs such as Word or Photoshop mostly just freezes the computer up.
I've never had this problem before at all. What could the prolem be? Is it a hardware problem? I'm unsure what to do, and I really don't want to turn in my computer anytime soon.
Thanks, William.

Answer 1

It is really hard to say if the hard drive, or hard drive interface is faulty without swapping in another hard drive. Since the Intel imac is not made for user access, I would ask a service technician to diagnose your error. If your data is not backed up, try a recovery using tools on my backup FAQ*:
http://www.macmaps.com/backup.html
if none of them see anything, ask if the technician can try to just remove the hard drive, if there is still some non-backed up data on it, so you can get a chance to put it in a Firewire SATA hard drive case to see if it can see any data that way.
- * Links to my pages may give me compensation.