my macs gone nuts

Did you have your phone plugged in when you went to start it up. Maybe it was trying to boot off of the phone???

 

I'm sorry, what...?


gelatin open disk utility and run disk permission repair on your main drive, I was going suggest maybe the usb sparked and it short circuited, but that would make it freeze, this looks like some kind of strange kernal panic...

To fix your wireless issue (possibly), go into System Preferences > Network > (Select airport) Advanced > select your network in the list, press the "-" button to remove it, then try connecting to it again, the settings could've become corrupt.

 

have you been sniffing something?

facepalm of the century, what next? booting from the MightyMouse?

 

Are you running 10.4 Tiger or 10.5 Leopard?

 

It's not a far stretch of the imagination for a computer to recognize an external USB device (such as a phone or flash drive) as a bootable disk. I'm not saying it'll actually load up an OS, but if the computer tried, you might get a funky looking screen like he posted up.

For example, when I plug my iPhone into my work's computer via USB to charge it, it recognizes it as a USB scanner, opens up the Command line prompt for some reason, it runs through some text, then crashes out the command prompt with an error message. So no, I don't believe my question was "too" far out there. Out there, yes......but not impossible.

 

Well for a start, PPC Macs can't boot off of USB drives anyway

gelatin, glad to hear everything's back to normal

 

Didn't know that. I've only owned Intel-based Mac's (and even then, I'm not sure if those could boot off of USB devices). I was pretty much just throwing it out as the "farthest-out-there" scenerio......as those type of scenerios are ususally the ones that plague me.

 

The Intel Macs can. I've seen the guys at the Apple store boot off an iPod Nano to run their battery test on a MacBook, which I thought was pretty cool.

This would be more likely to happen with a PC, it trying to boot up from anything that's plugged in other than the HDD. While not entirely likely here, you are right as it is possible. Anything is when it comes to troubleshooting computers from, "well, you have to plug it in to turn it on", to, "an extraordinarily large solar flare aimed towards my town cause electromagnetic waves to reverse the polarity of my LHC which then formed a blackhole that ripped off the faceplate on my computer just as a gnat flew in and shorted out my power supply." (I was going somewhere logical at first, honest, but then I spiraled out of control).

I've seen it. For reals