Ran out of things to try

[luisb1982]

Guys I bought a 21.5 iMac on february and so far the experience has been ok, this is my first mac desktop and with all it's advantages it's a really sensitive OS in my experience.

On Monday I started getting a lot of kernel panics and finder crashes doing nothing but browsing the net, this was using everything from chrome, Firefox and just to be sure safari. Thing was that I have been playing a lot of diablo3 and never had a panic during the game until today early on the morning.

Reading some forums (even this one) I used Internet recovery to do a complete reinstall and go back to 10.7.3, everything was fine until system preferences crashed twice in a matter of minutes, thinking that it was probably some small glitch I rebooted and it stuck on the grey screen with the apple, I booted the recovery partition and ran disk utility and it gave me the dreaded "this partition can't be fixed" and that i should reinstall.

Being the victim of a couple of damaged hard drives in windows this clearly smells of the hard drive failing, thing is that I ran onyx to do some manteinance after I restored from time machine and it didn't found anything bad with either the drive or the partition. Same for the SMART status.

I'm really at a loss, frankly besides regular com

 

[AdrianK]

thing is that I ran onyx to do some manteinance after I restored from time machine and it didn't found anything bad with either the drive or the partition. Same for the SMART status.

As far as I'm aware, that doesn't mean that the drive isn't faulty. I'd only trust SMART to tell me that there is a potential issue with the drive, not that there isn't an issue, since this sounds so much like an HDD issue. I'd definitely book an appointment at the Apple store.

 

[BlazednSleepy]

Just take it to the apple store. They will be more than happy to help.

 

[leman]

Well, you have your warranty, contact Apple and either bring in the computer to a store or authorized center for repair or let Apple pick it up. Much better than trying to do a repair yourself

 

[monkeybagel]

kernel panics can mean bad ram as well. Have you upgraded the ram in the machine?

 

[luisb1982]

Thank you all for your quick replies guys.

Yeah I know SMART stats are just a piece of the puzzle, what surprised me a little was how fast things deteriorated, just today I tried to do another time machine restore and the machine didn't even boot, nor find again the time machine external drive now, and this has to do with monkeybagel's question because I did add 2 more RAM sticks (bringing the machine to a total of 12 GB) but this was done back in February when I first purchased the iMac, and so far it didn't gave me any problems, (again I played a lot of Diablo 3 and even a few hours in bootcamp).

This is a pair of OWC 4 gigs, because I took 'em off and what do you know the mac started and I'm replying from it at this exact moment.

Frankly this situation has made me feel like a rookie when it comes to troubleshooting because it hasn't been just one thing. So before leaving for work and playing some Diablo to see how it was with the original 4GB everything was ok, so fingers crossed it stays that way.