HELP! Too many Kernel Panics!!!

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Mainyehc

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Everything fine now...

Except for some weird glitches. I've had to force a reboot more than once, because sometimes, I told the system to reboot and it wouldn't reboot. It got stuck in the blue screen with that grey spinning wheel.

But apart from that, now that I removed the RAM, I did not get any more big troubles. Now I'm desperately waiting for a replacement (maybe they're out of stock, anyway, the store hasn't contacted me yet), especially because I got used to having 1,25GB of RAM and now my machine is soooooo sloooooooow in comparison...

And btw, the RAM's brand is Lifetime. I was told at the store that it's a good quality brand, what's your opinion?
 
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ravenstor

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i had a similiar problem and thought it was bad ram, turned out be the original installation disk was slightly scratched and corrupted the system didn't show up till i put in some new ram, did it twice on 2 diff mem sticks, local repair installed fresh osx and it was all fine.
 
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PowerBook 12" Combo Drive/867 MHz/256 MB RAM/40 GB hard drive/Mac OS X 10.3.5/AirPort Extreme it sux
If you can, buy a new hard drive and install it yourself. I believe there are instructions at apple.com.
 
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zahadum

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ram errors vs bad installer -> disk errors?

ravenstor said:
i had a similiar problem and thought it was bad ram, turned out be the original installation disk was slightly scratched and corrupted the system didn't show up till i put in some new ram, did it twice on 2 diff mem sticks, local repair installed fresh osx and it was all fine.

yes, it does seem strange that a mem err should produce a side-ffect like a disk error!

disk util can not repair this msg - "reserved fields in the catalog record have incorrect data".

on the other hand, i cant understand how a defective installer (disk) could possibly effect any system files that would work OK with one set of mem chips but suddenly not work OK for other ram chips!? ... only way i can imagine this idea is if there are special logical addresses that the kernel uses that suddenly get 'touched' when the physical location of that address is (re)mapped - is that what a good service tech told you? ....

and btw: the installer extensively checks the media, so how is it even possible that the dvd installer could have ever made a corruption/mistake in the first place?

note: hw disagnostic reports same err msg as this fellow had with his 1GB part ...
the kernel panic msg reports 'invalid memory access' --
%SRR0: (various addresses - eg 000768a8)
%SRR1: 00003030

config: 10.4.5 (errs only occured after the upgrade from 10.4.4) on a ppc MINI with 1GB ram
 
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Really, really old thread!

Shouldn't these things lock themselves after, say, six months of inactivity? Hmm? I'll go suggest that....
 
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zahadum

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old threads should stay open? | does osx de-activate bad memory?

technologist said:
Really, really old thread!

Shouldn't these things lock themselves after, say, six months of inactivity? Hmm? I'll go suggest that....

i can understand the idea of closing a thread if the user has successfully resolved the inquiry (in this case the user gave up SUM and used target mode for backup instead; the underlying cause of the problem was never fully discussed).

... a new wrinkle: now there are no crashes (after 3 days of non-stop panics) ... but MoreInfo :: About This Mac reports that it sees only 512MB of ram noy 1GB (ppc mini has only one ram slot).

does this mean that osx can 'mark' bad ram the way a low-level formatting util marks bad disk sectors -- is that why the machine is niy crashing? because osx is not addressing half of the memory on one single dimm?

nice to know cuz 1GB ram is expensive!

cheers: dlf
 
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zahadum

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how is this a windoze question?

piece of apple said:
dudee!

what up with you and your Mac! you sound like a Windows user!!

pls explain?

how is the question about an mem err msg produced by apple's hw diagnostic boot disk _not_ a 'good' mac question?
 
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I didn't realise how old this question was. I would be nice if there was some quick obvious way to tell other than just the date.
 
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zahadum

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os/x partitions bad memory at start-up

here is an update on what i have learned about bad ram

(BTW: my guess is that the only connection between bad ram and a bad disk is that maybe damage to the VM swap file might get corrupt the open files on the disk -- but journaling is supposed to protect us from precisely that sort of proble, correct?).

i had a problem with my bad 1GB piece in a ppc mini .... and the author of the awesome new book "os/x internals" (he works at the google O/S) has some very specific info about how the boot process becomes aware of bad memory at startup (fotunately the firware & the kernel work together to partition off bad ram, so that you can keep working).

cf: http://osxbook.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=18

but strangely, sometimes these settings are lost from openfirmware & you have to keep re-booting until FINALLY the POST (power-on self test) catches the problem properly and hands it off to teh boot-loader to resolve correctly ....

another sign of this weird side-effect is that the volume settings for the start-up chimes are also lost from openfirmware (which is really annoying on the ppc mini; because for some reason the mute command only works on the system sounds not the startup/bootloader sounds .... so it is necessary to use a little utility called PSST to force the boot chime to always be off -- but this command doesnt always stick, just like the results from the POST disgnostics dont always stick in the PRAM either, leading the RAM problem mentioned above).

BTW: i could agree more with the owner of this thread: running the DIAGNOSTIC DISK is absolutely essential when you start seeing hardware problems (as well as making the obvious inspection of the logs and the 'About This Mac' system profiler info) ... NOTE: the Diagnostics tools are contained on their own hidden partition (disk utility will NOT show it!) on the startup disks - so it cant be copied into a bootable disk image (from an ipod, for example) -- which is really too bad!)
 

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