Kernel Panic = me to panic

[JoshBoy]

Hi all,

My imac has started to have a kernel panic all the time lately. It is where the whole screen will go darker and then a box in all different languages comes up saying I need to restart the computer.

I have a couple of questions in relation to this, first if I reinstall and then back up from timemachine will I have the same issue again? If I do a fresh install and reimport all my music and vids manually will that be a better way to do things?

Cheers

Josh

 

[angelwatt]

It all depends on the source of the problem. If it's software related, reinstalling will likely help. If it's hardware related, it won't help. You need to track down the source. OSX keeps track using logs of what happens. Check out the Console app for some messages. Also look in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/ for log files too or ~/Library/Logs/PanicReporter/. See this article from Apple also. Another web page with a decent write-up.

 

[JoshBoy]

Thank you. I have just posted it there with the details that are from the log report it asks me to send to apple -

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2525562&stqc=true

If anyone has an idea if it is software or hardware that would great.

Cheers

josh

 

[RockTheGlobe]

I was having frequent kernel panics as well (once a week), which freaked me out because my MacBook Pro was only 3 months old... I took it to the Genius Bar and showed the guy a couple of the crash logs. He said that the "cpu 0" line (which I also see in your crash log) usually means the RAM is bad and that's what's causing the kernel panic. Apple replaced my RAM free of charge since the machine was under warranty... it's been a week and no kernel panics since then -- fingers crossed!