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iMac crashes 5 x a day and beachball, what to do?

My iMac 27'' end 2009, Intel, OS 10.7.4, is crashing 5 times a day and showing the beachball, usually after some time, not immediately. Then i have to use the button to shut down. After running Tinkertools or using safeboot it works again for some time, till the next crash. DiskUtility, Onyx, DiskWarrior cannot help. What can i do? Please help.

Mac OS X (10.7)

Posted on Jun 1, 2012 3:50 AM

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20 replies

Jun 1, 2012 5:18 AM in response to blitzfromberlin

Make sure you have your information backed up. From many threads about your model iMac you may be experiencing the beginnings of a hard drive failure. If you need to repalce the drive make sure it is the same configuration as your existing one which has a built in temprature sensor. Otherwise your fans will run full speed.

Jun 1, 2012 5:27 AM in response to blitzfromberlin

I would recommend that you reboot while holding down the Command - R keys to get into the Recovery Partition. There, run Disk Repair and then run Repair Permissions twice. (Do NOT reinstall again.) A sizeable number of people have found that these steps solved the same problems that you are having. If that doesn't completely resolve it the the next step is to reset the PRAM, by rebooting while holding down the Command-Option-P-R keys. This may also be the problem solver you need.


Hope this helps 🙂

Jun 1, 2012 5:41 AM in response to blitzfromberlin

I would also run Apple Hardware Test in Extended Mode. If no errors appear after the first run run it 2-3 more times. AHT doesn't always catch errors the first time so it's wise to run it multiple times to thoroughly test. I agree it may also be a HD beginning to fail. 3 years isn't abnormal, some can last as short as days while other HD's can go many years. In short there simply isn't a way to predict when they will fail.

Jun 1, 2012 7:07 AM in response to Linc Davis

Difficult to answer. I always have more apps open. At least Mail, Safari, my Dutch/English/German/French-dictionary (I am Dutch but I live in Berlin) and sometimes but not always iTunes. That's at about it. When the crash begins i cannot close teh ap i am in, say Mail or Safari. I try to force closing and nothing works, even not the Finder. Any suggestion? Thank you so far.

iMac crashes 5 x a day and beachball, what to do?

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