What is Darwin?

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gafferbee

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 7, 2005
20
0
London, UK
Ahem.
Please excuse my ignorance, but odd things have been happening to my iBook. I had my logic board replaced (under Apple's replacement scheme) a few months back, but since then the old dear has never been the same.

Going in and out of sleep has been very erratic (waking up at odd times, going to sleep at the slightest movement of the screen, or not at all when i shut the lid), and the OS seems to just stop sometimes - freeze entirely.

There have been a couple of what I have now realised are kernel panics, although that hasn't happened for a while.

The most worrying thing is the two or three times the OS has just frozen and then when I try and do anything the screen just goes blank and leaves me with a black screen and a command line saying something like: Darwin (Henry [name of my computer] ) etc. With a flashing cursor.

Does this sound like another dodgy logic board, or maybe a botched repair? Or something worse (if that's possible)?

Ta
 

M

Makosuke

macrumors 603
Aug 15, 2001
6,179
345
The Cool Part of CA, USA
Well, Darwin is just the name of the flavor of Unix that underlies OSX, but I've never seen the OS crash to a command prompt like you describe. Rebooting into a command prompt is at least possible, though also rare, but having the entire GUI go down is a new one to me.

Were it just the kernel panics, I'd be inclined to suggest a bum logic board (or perhaps something peripheral to it--funky RAM, etc), but the combination of problems suggests that perhaps something's wrong with your OSX installation.

Have you tried reainstalling from scratch recently? That is, totally backing everything up, wiping the hard drive completely, and reinstalling everything fresh. If you haven't done this, it'd be the first thing to try, and if that doesn't help then a hardware problem is almost certainly what's going on.

Also, have you tried running the Hardware Test CD and/or the TechTool CD that comes with Applecare, if you have it? Worth a shot if you haven't.
 
MisterMe

MisterMe

macrumors G4
Jul 17, 2002
10,650
28
USA
gafferbee said:
Ahem.
Please excuse my ignorance, but odd things have been happening to my iBook. I had my logic board replaced (under Apple's replacement scheme) a few months back, but since then the old dear has never been the same.

Going in and out of sleep has been very erratic (waking up at odd times, going to sleep at the slightest movement of the screen, or not at all when i shut the lid), and the OS seems to just stop sometimes - freeze entirely.

There have been a couple of what I have now realised are kernel panics, although that hasn't happened for a while.

The most worrying thing is the two or three times the OS has just frozen and then when I try and do anything the screen just goes blank and leaves me with a black screen and a command line saying something like: Darwin (Henry [name of my computer] ) etc. With a flashing cursor.

Does this sound like another dodgy logic board, or maybe a botched repair? Or something worse (if that's possible)?

Ta
Click to expand...
Before you do anything drastic like reinstalling your OS, you should first try repairs. Boot from a CD and run Disk First Aid from with Disk Utilities. Run both disk repair and repair permissions. Also download and install MacJanitor. Run the periodic maintenance tasks. If you still have problems, boot into single-user mode by holding down [Apple]- on restart or boot-up. Run fsck -fy from the commandline. The type exit to continue to the GUI. Only if these actions fail to fix your problems should you reinstall your OS.
 

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