10.10.4 SPONTANEOUS REBOOTS

I've tried the SMD reset, and all of the other usual suspects. I guess this one is just 'toasted'. :-(

It was running perfectly well for years, until I made the mistake of installing "Adobe Creative Cloud" on it. Since then, its been DOWNHILL ALL THE WAY. That program has some serious conflicts with the OS X, every single Creative cloud update resulted in crashes, uninstalls, reinstalls... mostly centered around bad folder permissions

** incidentally, those were just a few 'highlights' I lifted out of the log... stuff that looked like it was complaining about something...

I've tried the SMD reset, and all of the other usual suspects. I guess this one is just 'toasted'. :-

It was running perfectly well for years, until I made the mistake of installing "Adobe Creative Cloud" on it. Since then, its been DOWNHILL ALL THE WAY. That program has some serious conflicts with the OS X, every single Creative cloud update resulted in crashes, uninstalls, reinstalls... mostly centered around bad folder permissions.

Anyway, I drove to the nearest town that had an Apple Store, and they had the machine in all day. Passed all hardware diagnostics. They opened it up and blew all the dust out, anyway (they said it was quite clogged with dust).

They recommend a clean OS install ... I have wiped the boot drive, and trying that now.

No more Adobe installations for me EVER AGAIN, I have cancelled my creative cloud subscription :-)

This is going to stay a lean, mean, media editing machine - only the bare minimum of absolutely essential apps will be installed.

Anyway, the hardware has a 100% clean bill of health.

I am going to run this machine for a few days without installing ANY 3rd party apps on it.

So if it starts spontaneously crashing again, I can reasonably assume its a bug in OSX...

ONE SECOND?? Right... it's been hanging on this screen for half an hour now!

Guess I will go for lunch :-)

Oops!! Spoke too soon, I just turn around from posting and its starting the install! BUT...

Thanks, Apple!

Time to wipe the drive ( again), and try installing (again).

Guess it was silly for me to trust the (verified!!) image file... going for the web download this time... [heavy sigh]

Wow! this is starting to look like JUNK SOFTWARE...

I went away for lunch, came back in an hour and I see EXACTLY the same screen as when I left.

Can anyone suggest what might be going astray here? I don't want to interrupt an OS install process - but on the other hand I NEED TO GET SOME ACTUAL WORK DONE TODAY...

OK.. this is getting CURIOUSER and CURIOUSER ...

Tried again, rebooted, into Internet recovery.. OK.

Wiped the boot drive, reformat ( 3rd time lucky? )

Verified the disk (OK)

Repaired the disk (came up OK, and set it was setting some boot something or other)

Installing OS... and THIS time, instead of downloading Yosemite, it is downloading "Lion" ( which I guess was the original OS when this machine was bought?)

At any event, it seems to have gotten farther this time, progress bar shows its about 1/8th of the way through.

Been sitting at "48 minutes remaining" for the past ten minutes or so, though... 😕

I'm wondering if maybe the 'install' issue is actually some glitch with the Apple "additional components download" SERVERS??

Now been 30 minutes hanging at this stage.. looks like I am going nowhere fast today.😢

(Holy Lost Productivity,Batman!!)

Seems this installer issue has something to do with Apple servers being unreachable.

Was on chat with two techs for an hour...

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202943 lists 4 software update servers...

From this OS-less imac, I could ping the first in that list, but none of the others.

The tech in Texas could ping swdownload.apple.com - but I couldn't reach it from here, nor from a remote server in Vancouver.

The Apple tech then discovered that he was unable to ping it from Atlanta!!! So it seems it's nothing to do with my local conditions, but rather some glitch in the Apple CDN network for distributing software. He wasn't able to proceed further with troubleshooting, but had to escalate to 'engineering'... so I'm looking at "2-3 business days" for a reply now 😟

Nobody quite is sure if that article is up-to-date with the servers ( a couple of those names are no longer in DNS!) , or if it even serves the "reinstall your OS" function, or not...

If anyone knows the link where I can download the DVD iso for any recent OSX, I would be most grateful.

I can't afford to be several more days behind on my urgent projects that rely on this workstation!! When it was running last week, I managed to use the built in boot media to make a 10.10.3 USB installer. But sadly, that USB is somehow corrupted - it starts off great but later errors out trying to extract a package midway through....