Chosen Solution
iMAC 8. 1 Early 2008 My iMAC 8.1 had started freezing up. I was running Leopard 10.5, ordered and installed Snow Leopard 10.6. Then proceeded to do the additional updates - after each update the machine would freeze at the end of the update. Would have to reboot. Once the machine was up and running , I would check what was the version of the OS - and it would show that the update was successful. After the updates the machine would still freeze and would have to reboot. I upgraded the memory to 4GB and replaced the harddrive with a 1TB SATA drive. I used the Snow Leopard disk and successfully installed the OS. But, during the account creation process the machine still freezes. What other hardware issue do I need to investigate?
I think you’ll need to run the onboard diagnostics. Follow this Apple TN: How to use Apple Hardware Test on your Mac. Let us know what it tells you. Clearly you still have a deeper problem. Reference: Startup key combinations for Mac
1st: Did you had this problem before changing the hard drive? 2nd: If the answer for the above question is NO, than 95% is a hard drive problem. So you need to change the hard drive.
