Help!! System Crashes!

Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
Anyone have any advice? My system has crashed a dozen times in the past couple days. I get this darkened screen and then a while box that says something along the lines of "you need to restart your computer, press the power button for a few seconds, or press the restart button."



Ti800, OS 10.2.3, 768MB RAM



I haven't installed anything lately as far as I know.



I has crashed 4 times in the past hour. Anyone have any ideas?!!?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 5
    der kopfder kopf Posts: 2,275member
    I guess you don't need a genius to tell you that you have some serious issues there. A few troubleshooting questions:



    what are you doing when this kernel panic occurs ('cuz there is a name for the well-known event you describe)? are you using any outside appliances (connected via usb/firewire)? they might be the source. Is there some disc/cd mounted? are you working with the app disk copy (I had two kernel panics while using that app).



    so, try to single out the problem like this. If still you don't really find a culprit (and in any other case too) you'll have to seriously try and fix stuff.



    Open the application Disk Utility (it's somewhere in the Applications/Utilities folder), and under tab repair, click repair disk permissions.



    After this, you might wanna restart from your boot-cd and run disk utility (from Installer menu) and run repair disk.



    If all these steps are completed, and you still have problems, you MIGHT have something serious on your hands. A total wipe of the HD, and a complete reinstall might be in order in that case.
  • Reply 2 of 5
    der kopfder kopf Posts: 2,275member
    also, you might want to try the Hardware test cd that came with the powerbook, to see if, maybe, you have some faulty ram in your machine (though I wouldn't immediately be inclined to think so)
  • Reply 3 of 5
    elricelric Posts: 230member
    Man that sounds scary <img src="graemlins/oyvey.gif" border="0" alt="[oyvey]" /> , what I would do is after I rebooted I would open Applications/Utilities/Console this will display a log of whats going on. Set it off to the side so it wont't get covered up and next time your machine freaks out look at the log and see what it says before you reboot, it might give you some insight as to what is going on.



    Good Luck!
  • Reply 4 of 5
    objra10objra10 Posts: 679member
    I had a LOTR Two Towers DVD (yes really, the second one, it's an academy consideration issue) in this afternoon when it crashed a couple times but it did it even once I was able to start up. I haven't been able to figure out a commonality. It has happened sitting on my lap with no external anything, and it's happened with peripherals connected. Oddly enough, the one setup I have NOT yet had a problem with is when it's connected to my firewire drive..





    2 weeks ago I upgraded to Jaguar, and 2.3, and it had been fine. I did a complete install, after formatting the whole drive. I just can't figure out why this has suddenly started! IS this something Apple Care will help me with?
  • Reply 5 of 5
    der kopfder kopf Posts: 2,275member
    [quote]Originally posted by OBJRA10:

    <strong>IS this something Apple Care will help me with?</strong><hr></blockquote>



    Well, I guess that depends on what stage of warranty you're in (still under phone assistance, or only hardware repair). I don't know. I guess they will tell you to go through the same steps as I did (although I'm not sure there). And, I don't think they'll let you send in your PB before you've reached the final recourse (being a complete reinstall), and still have problems.



    Did it start with that DVD, or is that just one time it really freaked out?



    Maybe you have some app running in the background? Are you connected to the internet during these panics? Maybe on AIM/iChat? Gnutella, Direct Connect? I hear some networking functions of OS X are still rather lacking.



    And even if you can't guess up a source of these problems, you still should go through the several steps of diskrepair and have a hardware check.
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