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Penryn MBP Kernel panics on boot.

S

snaky69

macrumors 603
Original poster
Mar 14, 2008
5,908
488
I've never had trouble with this computer ever. This is a first for me.

I'm just using it as usual, I had itunes going and one or two web pages open at most, then a beach ball occurs randomly, the one you can see on your desktop. The computer became utterly unresponsive. I had no other choice but a hard reboot.

Now the computer will simply not start. Every time I boot it up, I get the apple logo with a spinning beachball and it eventually Kernel Panics and asks me to reboot.

I'm running disk utility right now repairing permissions from the OS X disc. Hopefully that'll help.

Would this be a software issue or could it be hardware related? I opened it up and switched the RAM around to see if that would change the state of things, it did not.

I really do not want to do this even though I have a time machine setup, but would an clean wipe of the hard drive and a fresh install of OS X help things ?
 
Have you upgraded your RAM, or are you using the original Apple RAM that came from the factory?
 
fluffyx said:
Have you upgraded your RAM, or are you using the original Apple RAM that came from the factory?
Click to expand...

I'm using 4gb of patriot RAM, the ram itself is fine.

I reinstalled OS X, somehow all my files and user accounts stayed where they were. Everything seems to be working fine.

I got another freeze 2 minutes into using it this morning, hard reboot was necessary, then I disabled a recently installed widget(weather thingy) and it hasn't done it again. Quite the oddball problem.
 
Just because the compute boots and the Power On Self-Test passes doesn't mean the RAM is okay. Even the best diagnostic tools have trouble detecting bad RAM.

I might try putting the original RAM back in for a bit, and see if the freezing goes away.

-

EDIT: There's also a tool called memtest that, when looped in Single User Mode, is one of the better RAM diagnostic tools. You may be able to download it for free (it's an open source application). But removing the third party RAM and replacing it with Apple ram may be the easiest way to test.
 
fluffyx said:
Just because the compute boots and the Power On Self-Test passes doesn't mean the RAM is okay. Even the best diagnostic tools have trouble detecting bad RAM.

I might try putting the original RAM back in for a bit, and see if the freezing goes away.

-

EDIT: There's also a tool called memtest that, when looped in Single User Mode, is one of the better RAM diagnostic tools. You may be able to download it for free (it's an open source application). But removing the third party RAM and replacing it with Apple ram may be the easiest way to test.
Click to expand...

The apple RAM has been sold, I no longer have it. Bad ram wouldn't cause a kernel panic right on boot though.
 
The logs, if saved, are in /Library/Logs/PanicReporter/ .

Bad RAM could definitely cause a panic immediately on boot. You may wish to try reinstalling the OS, and seriously suspect the RAM.
 
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