Weird Fatal OSX Crash

[Nikolai01]

Hi all,

I just experianced a really weird fatal crash on my Macbook Pro running fully updated 10.4.11. I was surfing on Safari, minding my own buisness, when the screen started to dim from the top to the bottom. There was a horizontal bar above which the screen was dimmed that moved down--it took about 3 seconds. After which a large warning in ~4 different languages (English, spanash, german, and some asian, I believe) appeared on the screen saying I had to reboot. I then had to force reboot by holding the power key. An odd thing is that even though the sound was muted before the crash, and remained muted after rebooting, the boot chime still started when I restarted the computer. After reboot OSX told me that I had force rebooted, and asked if I would like a report--I said yes, but no report came up.

I wasn't doing anything strange with my computer, and afterwards I verified my disk and checked permissions using disk utility--no problems. I've never seen a crash like this before on my mac (or any other), and couldn't find anything on Google. Has anyone else experienced anything like this before? Any ideas of what's going on? Thanks!

 

[Mechcozmo]

Linkety to a kernel panic datasheet.

You can look in the Console, at panic.log, for more details.

 

[Peace]

That's called a kernel panic. It's a normal thing to see when a bad panic happens..

The black thing scrolling down is actually a layer on top that is outputting the notice to you to shut down now.

What were you doing before it panicked?

 

[Nikolai01]

Gah! Being my overly fastidious self, after posting I wend into Onyx and did a full suite of cleanings and whatnot...including the logs! <grumble, grumble>

As to what I was doing, I was just surfing in safari...absolutely nothing special. I think I had two windows open, and was scrolling down on one, but they were just normal pages on another forum.

Ah, the fabeled kernal panic...I've heard so much about them but never experienced one myself. Anyway, thanks for the info! I'll see if it happens again. Is there anything in general that can be done to prevent these from occurring, or are they kind of idiosyncratic?

 

[Chedam]

There is no way to stop them from occurring, but you can help prevent them by not installing applications that mess around with the main library.

I know most applications do that but stuff like Shapeshifter (a custom user interface program) can really mess around and corrupt things.

My MacBook is on a School-made build and I get them all the time - even logging in to my Home user can cause them. However, most of the software on the build was made for tiger, so I'm not suprised.

 

[krye]

Also called the Black Curtain of Death.