iMac Power supply or logic board?

[h linamen]

My wife's 20" G5 flat panel iMac, which is just 5 months out of 3 yr Applecare, is having major problems. First it started freezing up frequently and all we could do was a hard shut down. Now after booting up within just a few minutes of simple surfing we get the black box in the center of screen with white text which I think is a kernel panic. Says it must be shut down by holding power button the rear. I reloaded the system software and got back to 10.4.2 but when I tried to update to 10.4.11 with the combo update, I get the kernel panic. Does this sound like it might be power supply or logic board?

When I did google searches I was appalled at the number of complaints on these flat panel iMacs for power supply and logic board problems... both for the G5 and the intel. I saw a replacement video on the web showing a power supply swap and I think I could do that but would be hesitant to try the logic board. Are my symptoms suggestive of a defective power supply?

[Ken Sp.]

First thing I would check is a possible bad or failing hard drive.

If you have a way to boot from and external you might see if that fixes it.

Yes, it could be the Power Supply, but of the two, it is more likely a logicboard if not the drive.

It sounds like once it heats up you get the kernal panic, so try removing the RAM(some of those G5's had only one RAM slot with the other as soldered to the board.

If you want, there a was a logicboard repair place mentioned here about a month ago.I had a client use them with nice success.

http://www.apples-r-us.net/ApplesRUs/home.html

[JoeH]

Were some of the iMac G5's part of the group of machines that had the defective capacitors built into them? I thought I recalled a repair extension for G5 iMacs, but I do not see anything on the Apple site.

[DewGuy]

Recently had a G4 iMac with similar symptoms, turned out to be a stick of RAM that had gone bad.

[h linamen]

I was able to use the apple hardware test on the install disk 1 today and supposedly everything "passed, including the ram, memory, storage and logic board. Is the hardware test fairly reliable? Tomorrow I intend to try installing the OS again and if still getting kernel panics or frequent freezing guess I'll have to bite the bullet and initialize. Hate to do it as it is such a bear to reload everything as I did not clone the hard drive...just backed-up what was most important.

[Doc]

Have you removed and re-seated the RAM on that G5?

That's the first thing to check if you're getting panics.


> Is the hardware test fairly reliable?

It's reliable when it identifies that something is wrong. If it finds nothing wrong, that is not proof that nothing's wrong.

Here's how to determine if you've got a mobo problem, according to Apple:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2173

[Speedy]

Repair program "Closed."

http://www.apple.com/support/imac/repair...onprogram/