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Help troubleshooting kernel panics & startup problem

Would anyone be able to help me troubleshoot my iMac? I am a busy school teacher that has a large family and the nearest Apple store is the better part of an hour away. I would love to avoid spending 3-5 hours overall hauling this up there and maybe having to leave it there if I can possibly do so.


Lately I have had the following behaviors on my 2011 21.5" iMac:

  • kernel panics where the machine freezes (sometimes spinning beach ball, others non-spinning beach ball, other times an unprompted reboot followed by a message that the machine was restarted because of a problem). I am not able to detect a particular program causing this.
  • yesterday I found the machine with a folder with a question mark on a grey screen as though it could not find the start up disk. I used the power button to force it off and start up again and it functioned fine.

I am going to post 2 panic logs in the comment as they appear different (at least in length).


Things I have tried:

  • My time machine drive is no longer recognized by the machine. I believe this is unrelated (as it does not work on another machine either), but it stopped backing things up 2 weeks ago. I have unplugged it and still had kernel panics since then.
  • I am just now unplugging my USB hub with phone chargers and 2nd external hard drive to reduce peripherals connected. Not sure if that is going to help yet.
  • I tried rebooting into recovery mode to run a disk repair on my internal OS X running SSD (I put that in a few years ago alongside the HDD), but disk utility reported an error I cannot recall now saying it could not complete a repair. It did not identify the problem from what I can recall.

iMac (21.5-inch Mid 2011), macOS High Sierra (10.13.4)

Posted on Apr 20, 2018 3:20 AM

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Help troubleshooting kernel panics & startup problem

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