Mac crashed! Any way to know what was open before it crashed?

[Apple!Fre@k]

Just had my first kernel panic happen in longer than I can even remember -- at least 18 to 24 months! Of course, when it happens it completely locks up your system and you can't see anything other than the current window you were viewing.

I usually have about 15 windows open at any one time (not web tabs, but Text Edit docs, Pages docs, Word docs, etc.) and I can't remember all of the ones I had open.

Is there any way to find out what was open before I had to hold the button down on the back to reset my Mac? I'm guessing it must keep a log of some kind that withstands restarts? Any ideas?

Trying to think for the life of me everything I had open and can only remember about half the stuff. Also, one of the Text Edit docs I remember that was open that I hadn't saved seems to have been lost. Any idea why some of the unsaved docs were automatically recovered upon restart and others weren't??

 

[miles01110]

Apple menu > Recent Applications / Recent Documents

 

[Apple!Fre@k]

Apple menu > Recent Applications / Recent Documents

That only shows what was most recently opened, not what WAS open when the machine crashed.

I did send a crash report to Apple when it prompted me upon the restart. I'm guessing the data of what was opened had to be in there? Would there be file names, too, or just the name of programs? If file names, is there a log of the crash reports my computer sends out to Apple on my machine?

If that's not an avenue, any other ideas? Desperately need to know which files were open when it crashed!

 

[Apple!Fre@k]

Anyone???

 

[Tyr.]

Just had my first kernel panic happen in longer than I can even remember -- at least 18 to 24 months! Of course, when it happens it completely locks up your system and you can't see anything other than the current window you were viewing.

I usually have about 15 windows open at any one time (not web tabs, but Text Edit docs, Pages docs, Word docs, etc.) and I can't remember all of the ones I had open.

Is there any way to find out what was open before I had to hold the button down on the back to reset my Mac? I'm guessing it must keep a log of some kind that withstands restarts? Any ideas?

Trying to think for the life of me everything I had open and can only remember about half the stuff. Also, one of the Text Edit docs I remember that was open that I hadn't saved seems to have been lost. Any idea why some of the unsaved docs were automatically recovered upon restart and others weren't??

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but there's a reason they call them "panics". A kernel panic is a system halt, no further processing is done and everything stops literally mid-execution. So no saving or shutting down is done. The only thing that is recorded is the app that was running when the panic occurs, the instruction that led to the panic and the contents of physical memory at the time is dumped to a coredump. The system doesn't record what apps are running (Lion will do this in future) and certainly doesn't keep a list of open files, that's the application's responsibility. Basically unless your app was autosaving you'll have lost everything. So open all your apps and pray that they have some autosave and recover feature .