My OS X crashed (with style) ?

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Yesterday I was showing off some Exposé and Dashboard to a friend of mine, when the weirdest thing ever happened: My mac crashed (sort off). What really happened was the screen went dim (a gray overlay came running down from the top) and a nice big dialog box appeared saying that I need to restart my computer in 10 langauges or so. I rebooted and so far all is fine. That's all it said. SO weird. Any ideas why that happened?
 
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Its a kernel panic.. mostly caused by bad ram, or other faulty hardware. Did you upgrade anything recently?
 

dtravis7


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Yesterday I was showing off some Exposé and Dashboard to a friend of mine, when the weirdest thing ever happened: My mac crashed (sort off). What really happened was the screen went dim (a gray overlay came running down from the top) and a nice big dialog box appeared saying that I need to restart my computer in 10 langauges or so. I rebooted and so far all is fine. That's all it said. SO weird. Any ideas why that happened?

That was a Kernel Panic. I got the same thing maybe 1.5 months ago now with my same 2.1 Ghz imac. Not sure what caused it and it's never happened again. Mine though messed up OSX so I did a restore from the system DVD. Mine is in use 24 hours a day and has been for well over a year now.
 

dtravis7


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Its a kernel panic.. mostly caused by bad ram, or other faulty hardware. Did you upgrade anything recently?

In my case at least I am pretty sure it was just a glitch as it's never done it before or again and all the hardware has been the same for over a year. I was plugging stuff into the USB ports for testing but the KP was a bit later.
 
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I've had a handful of panics in the three months or so since I bought my MBP; I don't think (hope?) it's hardware related. Every time, it's happened when I had MSIE (either v6 or v7) running in Parallels and simultaneously working in Safari. That could just be a coincidence -- and there have been countless times I've had all three working together fine -- but it's the only common theme I've found so far.

Each time it happens, it's given me the chance on reboot to report it to Apple and I have. For what little that is probably worth. They haven't called me up to say, "wow, that stinks, we're sending you a new 8-core 3GHz Mac Pro to make it up to you." Those *******s.

:)
 
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that happened to me once about a month ago. I got my MPB in late december, and it happened after I brought it to school in mid January. Its never happened again tho...
 
M

MacHeadCase

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Congratulations on your very first kernel panic, yogi!
icon10.gif


Seriously though. The first time I saw one I was so scared! It was my iMac G4 and it had faulty RAM but I didn't know it. I was on Jaguar (10.2.x) and I was a bit afraid of the Unix thing and then... BAM!!! A kernel panic with all this serious looking stuff written on the screen. I was scared outta my wits.

Run the Hardware Test, yogi. In Extended Mode. Intel-based Macs: Starting up into Apple Hardware Test.


Edited to add:

Oops! You have a PowerPC CPU (iMac G5)... Just insert the DVD and restart holding down the C key in that case.
 
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Thanks MHC and all the other guys.

So that's what a kernel panic is. I always steered clear of those threads here. Wow. I'll get back with the test results.
 
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Next time open Console and look through the logs for a clue as to why it happened. Hopefully, there won't be a next time, though.
 
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I've never had a kernal panic (nor have anyone else in my family) in over 3 years with 9 different macs
 
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i've had about 1 everyday on my old ibook, and it wasn't the ram bc i replaced it multiple times...haven't had one yet on the MBP...
 
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I managed to repair my startup disk, but I doubt that was the cause. Maybe I was just being to extravagant when showing off exposé (with all the live video, spotlight and all at the same time). Who knows... Hopefully never again.
 
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I've never had a kernal panic (nor have anyone else in my family) in over 3 years with 9 different macs

you're lucky.. my quad has been giving me them very often lately... and even freezes in target disk mode, so i think my hard drives are going.. I'm bringing it into the apple store as soon as I get my work off of it.
 

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