27" 5K Retina Display iMac (Late 2015) Screen glitching and crashing with no replicatable cause.

Hi, I've had this problem for years and have searched for a fix but can't seem to find the cause of this issue.


My iMac screen will glitch out and the computer will crash. This happens fairly often, maybe once or twice in a session even whilst using fairly low-demand applications such as Chrome, Word and Teams. I find I can't replicate the issue on purpose.


Sometimes the screen will glitch and then recover and be okay. Sometimes it won't happen for weeks but eventually, the screen will start to glitch again. Also, occasionally when the computer crashes it won't boot back up again, the boot starts but the bar gets stuck at around 25% or sometimes 70%.


This has been a very frustrating issue for me, I actually stopped using this computer in 2020 but after a need arose I plugged it back in with the hopes it would work again and it did! And it worked perfectly, for a couple of weeks. Now the same old problems have reared their heads again.


Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have attached the latest crash report:



iMac 27″, macOS 12.7

Posted on Mar 6, 2024 12:31 AM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Mar 10, 2024 5:19 AM

Error 5101...

So, according to the articles, I have an incompatible Boot ROM version (or commonly known as BIOS). (To check it, go to the Apple logo - About My Mac- System Report - Hardware and see the number of Boot ROM version)

And that was right! I have two other MBPs and the Boot ROM versions were 428 for the 2014 and 424 for the 2015. The problem one was still at 192. My speculation is macOS has something similar to a compatibility mode so it could run on older BIOS versions but couldn’t boot from the Recovery Partition, especially Big Sur. I bought this Mac with no SSD and put in an SSD with Catalina pre installed, so the BIOS was probably not updated.

So how I solved this was pretty time consuming, but it worked! I used Shift Cmd Opt R to get Yosemite back on the SSD. Then I went to App Store and updated to Big Sur. After a longer than usual update and many more restarts that took about 3 hours total, my Boot ROM version was updated to 424 and the problem was solved.

EDIT: I got another one with ver. 180 firmware and when I trigger IR it doesn’t error out anymore, but the latest OS it could go up by IR is Catalina. From there I could manually update to Big Sur 11.1 but the firmware version stays the same. And of course, no access to Recovery partition. They fixed it in a half-assed way.


https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookrepair/comments/kab0an/error_5101f_on_macbook_pro_2015_and_how_i_solved/


5101F error - Apple Community


Try this, I was also getting the same 5101F error..

pressing Option+Command+R doesn’t work so I reinstalled the earlier OS by pressing Shift+Option+Command+R and then Start button.

 It takes nearly 30-40 minutes to reinstall the earlier version of Mac OS. In my case I had Catalina installed by earlier version of Sierra installed.

 This will definitely work..


5101F error - Apple Community



Similar questions

26 replies

This thread has been closed by the system or the community team. You may vote for any posts you find helpful, or search the Community for additional answers.

27" 5K Retina Display iMac (Late 2015) Screen glitching and crashing with no replicatable cause.

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.