Really Weird Error

[jerkypnut]

I've been using Macs for 12 years, OSX for almost three, and I've never experienced anything like this:

I was logging onto AOL (yeah, I know. . . ) when the message "Exception state (sv=0x00336230) previously dumped as 'Latest' state, skipping..." repeated itself down the screen. It didn't come up as an error box-- it just wrote in white letters across everything. When it reached the bottom of the screen, my entire desktop shifted upward until the screen was black, with the same error message repeating ad infinitum.

I was able to reboot with ctrl+cmd+power, and everything seems to be working now.

I'm wondering:
-Has anyone else seen this?
-What happened?
-How do I prevent it from happening again?

I'm using a 1GHz 12" PB, 512 MB RAM, OS 10.3.5, no updates/installations within the last few days.
I had Excel, Firefox, and probably Word running in the background.


Any ideas?

 

[wrldwzrd89]

I've been using Macs for 12 years, OSX for almost three, and I've never experienced anything like this:

I was logging onto AOL (yeah, I know. . . ) when the message "Exception state (sv=0x00336230) previously dumped as 'Latest' state, skipping..." repeated itself down the screen. It didn't come up as an error box-- it just wrote in white letters across everything. When it reached the bottom of the screen, my entire desktop shifted upward until the screen was black, with the same error message repeating ad infinitum.

I was able to reboot with ctrl+cmd+power, and everything seems to be working now.

I'm wondering:
-Has anyone else seen this?
-What happened?
-How do I prevent it from happening again?

I'm using a 1GHz 12" PB, 512 MB RAM, OS 10.3.5, no updates/installations within the last few days.
I had Excel, Firefox, and probably Word running in the background.


Any ideas?

Sounds like a very bizarre kernel panic message. What happened was that the Mach kernel, the core of Mac OS X, encountered an error it couldn't recover from, tried to dump the error information to a file and succeeded, was still in the error state, so it attempted a dump again, which was not needed, so it skipped the dump, but the error still hasn't gone away, so it tries a dump again...you get the picture. I'd post a message about this on the Apple Discussion Forums and see if they know anything about the message you got since I have no idea what caused it nor how to stop it from recurring (if it does recur).

 

[kgarner]

It sounds like a kernel panic, but those are ususally handled with the dialog they introduced in 10.2. A very starnge problem to be sure.

Update: wrldwzrd89 beat me to it. And with a far better explanation.