First ever kernel panic...

[kernelPANIC]

I just had my first kernel panic in os x. You know the one where they give you the power button and saying to restart the mac. Well yeah. I wasn't doing anything besides browsing the internet. Anything I should be worried about ?

Baby, this time I went easy on you. Next time I won't be so nice.

Joking aside, I know the feeling, (hence my GBATemp tag, which I use in a couple other places whenever is not taken), the first time it happens you just think it's like one of those lovely blue screens of death that windows has, but it can be a one time thing or a more serious issue. The real problem is that a Kernel Panic error only shows for certain and grave reasons and it can easily corrupt your system (if the message keeps reappearing, you're in for trouble). In my case, I have a G4 iMac, the ones with half a basketball for CPU, and I got one of those lovely Kernel Panic errors. At first the messages appeared 1 hour after I booted the computer. After that, the time intervals kept getting shorter up to the point where it couldn't get passed the gray screen that appears when you turn on a mac. It was the logic board (a motherboard in PC terms), which just had to fail on me one month after the original warranty of the iMac expired (they sell those Apple care packages for a reason). If I remember correctly, the repair was somewhere around 300-400 Euros.
I just hope your Kernel Panic error is not related with hardware problems.

Good luck.

 

[E2EKIEL]

This is not a PC vs Mac thread. Please make a note of it!

On topic:
What type of Mac are you using ZeWarrior? Any hardware changes recently? USB cards? RAM? HD?
Has it happened more than just once?
If you can get this far, make another user account on the machine and see if you get panics in that account.

As far as being worried goes, any glitch is a nice reminder to back up your important files.

Dude, you really sound like the Applecare Helpdesk. I can talk about it, I'm working there

You're totally right. first thing to know is what kind of mac you have zewarrior. there is a known issue connecting one of the the macbook models to a 3rd party wireless network while the mac isn't connected with the power adapter, the only solution at this moment is just to use it with the power adapter.

besides of that, I advice you to remove temporarly all USB peripherics, check your HDD with disk utility or with the FSCK command, check your RAM modules running an apple hardware test in extended mode, reset PRAM and SMC (PMU or SMU for older macs), remove all startup items from /library/startup items/, try another admin user, and if still nothing found archive and install. if after that you still have kernel panics, better go to a service provider

 

[martin88]

So kernel panic is like a blue screen of death for Macs?

I thought Macs are more stable than Windows...guess not.

 

[arctic_flame]

 

[Heran Bago]

I don't get this picture. I have a good degree of experience with all three and it's Linux that requires the most work to set up and run and it's only useful as a dev environment. Even then it's a bitch getting new shit working. I fin Ubuntu annoying in that you have to type in your password all the time.
XP hasn't been that high-maintenance for me.
Fairly good representation of newer OSXs though.

 

[arctic_flame]

Is a tank easy to drive? I doubt it.

 

[kernelPANIC]

So kernel panic is like a blue screen of death for Macs?

I thought Macs are more stable than Windows...guess not.

Well, sort of.
Kernel Panic errors can occur on PCs running UNIX (like Linux) as well. In MY experience macs are slightly more stable than Windows based PCs, but that's only in my experience (I've been working with both platforms for over 10 years. I'll always use both.)
Check out the wikipedia for more info.

 

[notnarb]

Last warning. Keep it on topic, or posts will start dropping like flies.

hey, half my post was relating to kernel problems

 

[modshroom128]

I just had my first kernel panic in os x. You know the one where they give you the power button and saying to restart the mac. Well yeah. I wasn't doing anything besides browsing the internet. Anything I should be worried about ?

yeah, the fact that you own a mac.

 

[Mangofett]

I just had my first kernel panic in os x. You know the one where they give you the power button and saying to restart the mac. Well yeah. I wasn't doing anything besides browsing the internet. Anything I should be worried about ?

Witticism deleted -mthr


QUOTE

Last warning. Keep it on topic, or posts will start dropping like flies.

 

[ZeWarrior]

This is not a PC vs Mac thread. Please make a note of it!

On topic:
What type of Mac are you using ZeWarrior? Any hardware changes recently? USB cards? RAM? HD?
Has it happened more than just once?
If you can get this far, make another user account on the machine and see if you get panics in that account.

As far as being worried goes, any glitch is a nice reminder to back up your important files.

I reinstalled OS X because the file system got corrupted. Before I had upgraded the RAM so It might be that, I think I'll run memtest over night.

 

[xbandaidx]

hmm my mac is running fine. It's been god knows how long since I seen a kernal panic screen. I actually don't think I remember it or what I was doing at the time.

 

[mthrnite]

Last time I was troubled with 'em was when my really really cheap USB card stopped playing nice with my G4 MDD. Changed the card, panics stopped.

Don't forget to back up Ze... really.

 

[Strokemouth]

So have you had any other kernel panics since this one? You should be able to get an idea of what was going on at the time of the panic by checking the log that gets created when you first get the KP. Go to Applications, then Utilities and open Console. On the left, expand the folder called /Library/Logs and select the file named panic.log. This will give you information on modules that were loaded during the time of the panic and might point you in the right direction.

I had a similar problem a while back where a certain version of APE/Shapeshifter was causing random KP's.

 

[ZeWarrior]

Nope haven't had a kernel panic in a while. And mthrnite I think I will... I'll need to buy an External HDD first though

 

[Strokemouth]

I wouldn't worry too much about it then. You can still check that panic.log in the console if you're bored though.

And save your pennies and get ready for Leopard next week! That'll make backups much easier for you.

 

[Switchy]

Very true! I'm very excited about Leopard. It will be beautiful and mighty good, I'm sure of it.

 

[Deleted User]

In Mac OS X 10.2 or before, a simple way for a kernel panic to happen :
a) Open a Terminal
b) type
> mkdir foo
> cd foo
> mkdir foo
> mv foo ../foo
c) Profit

It is what happens when you want to recode the wheel and you suck at it. Hopefully apple learned from this, and Leopard is really cool.