24" iMac freezing occasionally/Please Help

24" iMac freezing occasionally without allowing force quit. Sometimes when I attempt to restart it, when the computer comes back on it will freeze on a gray screen with a folder in the middle with a question mark on it. If I unplug all peripherals and the iMac power cord and let it sit for a while, it starts working again Sometimes I might get 4 days of use before it happens again. Then sometimes it might happen 2 or 3 times in a day. I've always heard the gray screen with foler with question mark was the mark of death for the hard drive. If this information is true, how am I able to get it to work occasionally with no porblems?
Thanks,
34firefighter

I found out what was happening... I was running screen dimming software called 'Shades' which was messing up the colour profile allocation. I stopped this software running and I was able to recalibrate! I'm so pleased as I thought there was something wrong with my graphics card!

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IMac Freezing/crashing, please help. Tried everything! :(

Hello Fellow MacTalkers,
I am writing this post to ask you for a help with an issue that is very frustrating to resolve.
To begin with, I have purchased my MacBook Pro 2.4 GHZ, 3GB, Leopard running notebook about 7 months ago.
Until recently I have discovered that my computer is crashing randomly.
I am not a very tech oriented person, who knows much about console, logs and sorting out the hardware / software related issues.
About 2 months ago I started to experience some random freezes on my computer. Those freezes were occurring on different type of situations so it was hard for me to identify what could be causing the problem. The most common freezing that I have encountered, was and is that my computer screen just freezes and I can't perform any reset or rescue. Simply hard reset.
I started to think that this could be a cause of getting an extra 1GB memory that I purchased from Apple store, and that the memory could be faulty. But just to make sure I have done a clean re-instal of my os. making sure that I have all my permissions everything that could be a "common" cause of any weird behaviors on a mac sorted.
After the reinstall it got even worse.
I decided to take my computer to Apple authorized centre in Sydney broadway NextByte shop.
I explained the problem, asked if that would be possible to check some sort of console logs and track back what could be the cause of the problem that I am experiencing.
I left my computer for 2 weeks in service. And after that 2 weeks they have replied to me saying that they have detected no faulty with the hardware what so ever. I keep on persisting that I understand that the service people have done all the tests on external peripherals, checked the system performance through some kind of testing tools and it resulted with no problem. I rang the Apple complaints department asking if they could do anything about it as I am very worried that this issue won't disappear. They have informed me that there is nothing thay can do and they are basically sending my back home.
I collected my computer 2 days ago and started setting up some programs like adobe and all my apps. At first it was running all well, but then it started (leopard or hardware) to freeze again. On no particular occasion. I had to crashes in 3 hours.
I remembered the time of the crash and after the reboot, I checked my console and here is what I could find:
12/05/08 11:00:07 PM com.apple.launchd[1] (0x10b260.mdworker[1036]) Exited abnormally: Segmentation fault
I don't know if that is related to this post in any way, but as I said at the beginning I have no technical knowledge on where to investigate it further.
I would like to ask you for your recommendation on what should I do next.
I hope there is nothing that I am doing wrong with my computer as I am keeping it organized nad well maintained.
I thought also that that could be overheating related issue so I bought a notebook cooler, but that doesn't seemed to resolve the problem.
I am running out of ideas. Apple won't help me in solving the problem, I am also not sure how should I approach this case from the legal perspective. Can I go to fair traiding institution and ask them for help to enforce apple on returning my money for laptop, should I perform any tasks on my computer to fix the problem with some software.
Help, I am really running out of ideas. I am doing graphic design daily and this problem is driving me crazy.
I would appreciate your feedback or any suggestions on what should I do next.
Sorry for my cracked english. Im still learning my lingo in Australia
PLEASE PLEASE, help me on this one.
Kind Regards,
Michael Saganowski
<Edited by Moderator>
Message was edited by: sgnwsk

For what its worth, it sounds like the Leopard woes I was having before I left and went back to Tiger. I was in leopard for three months and I had too many problems to list here, but some common ones were Random system freezes/crashes (especially in itunes coverflow), Finder freezing, Adobe CS3 crashing and being generally buggy, not being able to run Final Cut Pro and After Effects at the same time.
My advice to you, check your memory if you feel like it could be the problem. If your memory is OK, then wait for the 10.5.3 update which is supposed to be out really soon (like within a couple of weeks or so from what I hear.)

HT1477 When i disconnect my iPod 2nd Gen from my laptop, its display turns off and working freezes. Please help me.

When i disconnect my iPod 2nd Gen from my laptop, its display goes off and working freezes. Please help me.

The computer freezes? There may be something wrong with the USB port. If the laptop has more than one port, does this happen on any port? If you are disconnecting the shuffle cable from the computer, does it make any difference if you disconnect the shuffle at the other end of the cable first, then disconnect the cable from computer? Or if you currently disconnect the shuffle from cable first, try it the other way.
You may be able to work around this problem, if you get a self-powered USB hub. Something like this one
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I own a MacBook Pro 2.4 ghz non unibody. I turn on my laptop for ten seconds and it freezes. It boots perfectly and runs for ten seconds until everything freezes. Please help!

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See if you can boot into single user mode with Command S.

Continued Freezing Problems - Please help!

Hello everybody.
A few months ago I picked up a used G5 iMac. It has a 1.8 Ghz PowerPC processor, 2 GB RAM, a superdrive and a 20" display.
After 6 weeks ago, I started having problems with programs crashing and the screen shaking. After getting some poor advice that my software was to blame, I reinstalled my operating system. The computer was running OS X 10.4.4 at the time and when I reinstalled I installed 10.3.5 which the computer quickly upgraded to 10.3.9. This caused a few other odd problems like the system profiler not opening from the "About this Mac" window.
After some research I correctly diagnosed that I was having this problem: http://www.apple.com/support/imac/repairextensionprogram/
I took the computer down to the local Apple store for the repairs. After about two weeks one of the techs at the Apple store called me back and told me that the original problem had been fixed, but now there was another problem.
According to the tech when testing the hard drive they were getting a read/write error. He told me that this was due to either corrupted software or a failing hard drive.
I did not have a warranty on the mac as it was about two years old, I didn't have the money to pay for the continued repairs, and frankly I couldn't rule out that the techs at the store hadn't caused the problems themselves when they removed the hard drive for testing.
So I took the computer home. The computer booted up properly but the cursor would often freeze, the fan would spin hard and I would need to hold down the power button to reboot the machine. The system profiler still would not open and my USB devices were often not showing up. In some circumstances it would freeze every time - for example just after scanning an image in Photoshop.
So to test whether I was having a hardware or software problem I used an external hard drive to clone my existing hard drive and booted from that. I scanned an image in Photoshop, started editing it, and viola, it crashed.
So I set my hard drive to zero, and reinstalled the operating system from scratch.
During the second install disk I had a cursor-freezing crash. I used the power button to reboot the machine again, and the install picked up where it left off. It finished with no further problems.
The machine works better now than it has - system profiler opens properly and some other odd problems have been fixed. USB devices work much better. But the cursor still freezes occasionally, especially in Photoshop. I'd say it was Photoshop that was unstable, except that the freezing also happens occasionally when it hasn't been open at all. Other new strange behavior has cropped up as well - like the icons for iTunes and Safari keep switching in the dock.
I've tried so much - I even ran a virus check because if this was a Windows machine I would almost certainly think I had a virus. This is awful - I am a freelance cartoonist and graphic designer and this situation is ruining my productivity. I've left this amount of detail because I feel like I've tried everything, and ruled out all the possibilities. Right now I'm cloning my hard drive yet again to see if maybe both my hard drive and my software was failing. But I thought maybe someone on this forum may have another idea.
Thanks very much for your time.
-scott
iMac G5 Mac OS X (10.3.9) upgraded to 2GB RAM

Hi. It's me again. My name is slightly different because the forums won't let me log in for some reason. Strange.
Anyway, I was wrong before, this problem is not solved. It's resilience is astounding, as I've been completely obsessed with this problem for over a week now.
Anyway, I've tried alot. In respose to the previous inquiries, the S.M.A.R.T. reads verified and I've run the hardware check DVD and everything comes up roses.
The weirdest thing about this problem is that many things will fix it for a little while. Dumping my Photoshop prefs seems to help for a little while.
Also, this computer can't tell time. I realized that my CR2032 battery on the motherboard may be dead so I replaced it. The first time it acted a little funny in Photoshop, and then I dumped the prefs folder and it seemed to work fine. Went to work, it went to sleep, I came home and it was dead again.
I replaced the battery again just to make sure. Both times I reset the PMU by holding down the power button when I plugged it in. No luck.
I've also reinstalled the operating system twice. I've erased the StartUp partition when I've done that. I've been very careful about repairing permissions when I install new software, and I built my desktop very deliberately. Again, this seems to help as I'm going, but eventually it crashes once and eventually deteriorates to consistently crashing in Photoshop after even a couple of minutes.
To test whether my Adobe software is bad I borrowed a friend's installation disks. Those didn't work either.
And while it's mostly Photoshop, sometimes it's not. When it's really bad iTunes will crash too, and a combination of Photoshop and iTunes can be deadly. If it's on its best behavior, iTunes can play while Photoshop is open.
Once the freeze happened immediately after startup, but before the OS came up entirely.
If this were a Windows PC, I'd be sure I have a virus. Small changes cause increased stability and then slow and consistent deterioration.
All remaining theories I have are wild speculation involving conspiracies by the Apple company and/or Apple store. I'm very close to calling this computer a lemon. Are there any ideas left???

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24" iMac freezing occasionally/Please Help

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