Kernel Panic problem - iMac

[Vita]

Hi,

I'm writing this for a family member. He recently had a Kernel Panic on his iMac, tried to resolve it by repairing using the OS snow leopard CD but couldn't. He can access the drive for his files etc but the OS won't boot. He accessed it by connecting it via usb to his iMac, or so he tells me.

The last thing he did was render a video however, it failed, and before shutting down some IE popup came up, after that the next time he booted up it kernel panicked.

Is the drive faulty or is something else the problem?

 

[uniQ]

Could be any number of things. Would help knowing the message of the kernel panic otherwise we're just going to be plucking at straws. The backtrace normally holds the meat of information.

But I would try and boot in to target mode and backing up the drive before trouble shooting. Then have a look for crash logs in Console.

Otherwise have a read up on debugging kernel panics:
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#technotes/tn2063/_index.html

 

[Vita]

Well he replaced his HDD and updated his RAM. So far so good. He sent me a pic of the kernel log and the dependency was;

com.apple.iokit.iousbfamily(5.1)

He has four USB devices attached, and has never had a problem in the past.

 

[theheyes]

I would have suspected the RAM or the disk... since he replaced both and it seems to be working fine now I guess I would have been right.

 

[Skyboat]

you can hold down D on the keyboard to run a hardware diagnostic