Kernel panics even after reinstall.

[Tsuchiya]

Hi all, a bit desperate here. My MacBook pro displayed it's first kernel error last wednesday, after running fine for 3 years. I had not installed any new software or hardware for a while and in fact it had been only lightly used in the past week or so since I got my iPad (which I have since learnt does NOT make an adequate laptop replacement!).

Just wondering if anyone could offer up any last minute solutions before I take it to the "geniuses" tomorrow who will without doubt want to keep it for like a week while they sort out the issue.

Some background information:

-2007 2.4ghz MacBook Pro running snow leopard. As far as I know it's fully up to date, though right now I'm not sure what number it is.

-only changes in the past 3 years was an upgrade to 4gb of ram about 2 years ago.

-first panic happened while the laptop was just left on standby for the day, I wake it up and 5 minutes later the screen started flickering, after a restart, the message appears

-manage to boot into my vista partition just fine, figured it's probably software so I reinstall snow leopard.

-works fine for about a day, then message reappears, now I can't even get into osx after a reinstall (kernel panic).

-vista boots about 1/3 of the time now, and even then it will randomly restart soon after loading the desktop.

-also just so you guys know, I have read that it might be ram related, but I no longer have my original sticks to try. Also earlier today my laptop wouldn't turn on for a while.

It does sound pretty hopeless, and if nothing else works I do have Applecare to pick up the tab...but from experience they take far too long to do repairs!

Sucks not having my laptop to use

 

[miles01110]

You could try taking out one stick of RAM at a time to see if either one causes the kernel panics. If not your hard drive might be toast.

 

[tdgrn]

It sounds like a hardware problem. Just guessing here, but it might be your graphics card, as the 07 MBP's had the Nvidia 8600 series, which were ticking time bombs. Good luck at the genius bar tomorrow.

 

[Tsuchiya]

You could try taking out one stick of RAM at a time to see if either one causes the kernel panics. If not your hard drive might be toast.

Cool, I'll try this- thanks man. I'm racking my brains now trying to think if there was anything of value on my hard drive, but I think most of it would be safe on my external disk.

Tdgrn, I think you might be right, literally as i was typing this message, my laptop was running disk utility in the background and the screen flickered again and went really dodgy before restarting (again...in the middle of erasing my vista partition...)

Argh, genius bar it is.

 

[Tsuchiya]

After a bunch of tests, my laptop managed to boot into safe mode and incredibly the problem was the Air Video application I downloaded a few weeks back for my iPad.

Totally confused, but after that one tiny little file was gone, my laptop boots perfectly now. Just wish I hadn't wiped my vista partition in vain...