Macbook Pro, Incessant Kernel Panics

[cmyk]

Hi,

I have looked through the forums and haven't found what I was looking for, so I thought I would post. I was looking for ideas as to possible causes for my problem.

Basically I installed 10.5 onto my Macbook Pro (I'm afraid I can't remember the exact specs, but it was the model available before Leopard was shipped) Once I had installed Leopard, the MBP started to kernel panic on a regular basis, each one would have a different cause in the panic log. Anyway, I reinstalled everything and it calmed down for a couple of month. On Sunday, whilst using the BBC iplayer I started to get another round of panics. However this time, the MBP will not allow me to reinstall either leopard or tiger as I can never get move than 5 minutes out of it before it has a kernel panic. I've handed it in to be repaired, but I was wondering if anyone on here had had a similar problem and had an idea of what the problem might be.

Sorry for the relative vagueness of my post

thanks

 

[jablko]

It could be a number of things. I kept having seemingly random freezes on my MBP and went through these steps:

1. Made sure my system was updated with the most recent patches.
2. Repaired permissions on the drive using Disk Utility.
3. Checked in the crash logs to see if a specific program was doing it (it seemed to happen on any program).
4. Tested the RAM by only using one module at a time and by running Rember.
5. Posted to these forums for help (and didn't get any advice I didn't already know).
6. Kept searching.

I didn't call Apple because I couldn't live without a laptop at that time and sending it in wasn't an option, so I just lived with the random freezes and restarts.

Anyway, I eventually found a post in another forum about the same problem and they believed it was a conflict with the drivers for the keyboard backlighting. Sure enough, I pressed f8 to turn off the backlighting and I haven't had a freeze since.

So, see if it's the same keyboad backlight bug and if it's not, you can try the other steps enumerated above.

 

[cmyk]

It could be a number of things. I kept having seemingly random freezes on my MBP and went through these steps:

1. Made sure my system was updated with the most recent patches.
2. Repaired permissions on the drive using Disk Utility.
3. Checked in the crash logs to see if a specific program was doing it (it seemed to happen on any program).
4. Tested the RAM by only using one module at a time and by running Rember.
5. Posted to these forums for help (and didn't get any advice I didn't already know).
6. Kept searching.

I didn't call Apple because I couldn't live without a laptop at that time and sending it in wasn't an option, so I just lived with the random freezes and restarts.

Anyway, I eventually found a post in another forum about the same problem and they believed it was a conflict with the drivers for the keyboard backlighting. Sure enough, I pressed f8 to turn off the backlighting and I haven't had a freeze since.

So, see if it's the same keyboad backlight bug and if it's not, you can try the other steps enumerated above.

Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately for me, I have already tried everything you have suggested. And now I am at the stage where there is nothing I can do to sort the problem as I can't barely get the machine to hold together long enough to check permissions.

 

[jablko]

I guess my next move (aside from calling Apple) would be to try and boot using either an install disk or a Linux live cd to see if you experience problems in those environments. If you do have problems, it's got to be hardware. If you don't, it's probably either your OS or your hard drive.

You may want to format your drive and reinstall OSX. If you need to back up files, you can use your Linux live CD to mount your HFS file system then copy files to an external drive (there are instructions here for mounting an HFS drive in the Ubuntu live environment: http://jclark.org/weblog/2005/05/24/ubuntumount/).

 

[iHerzeleid]

I would just contact Apple and let them replace your logic board.