"you need to restart ..." i.e. kernel panics on boot

[j00d]

Hi, for a MBP 4,2 A1260, on every boot it will show the dreaded "you need to restart" error message.

I ran a hardware diagnostics by holding down D on startup and then ran the extended test and there

were no errors. It indicated that this MBP had an Nvidia 8600m graphics chipset.

I got a 32bit linux mint 16 live dvd and it would not show a command prompt or render a screen, but then I booted in compatibility mode, and I was able to mount the HD and browse the filesystem, so I'm guessing that RAM, logic board, and HD are not an issue.

Linux Mint did throw up an error about "software rendering" the graphics and that would account for high cpu usage, but I don't know if that's from graphics hardware or a function of running in compatibility mode.

So, is it the graphics chipset? If so, I believe that there were massive problems with this particular chipset. Did apple do something like a recall for this model?

Thanks for any help.

 

[Weaselboy]

It is possible the GPU is bad. What would help diagnose this is if you posted up the output of the Console log at the time of the crash. There should be a crash report there.

 

[j00d]

It is possible the GPU is bad. What would help diagnose this is if you posted up the output of the Console log at the time of the crash. There should be a crash report there.

Thanks but how do I get that output? It basically won't boot past the spinning grey circle and grey apple logo

 

[Weaselboy]

Thanks but how do I get that output? It basically won't boot past the spinning grey circle and grey apple logo

See if you can boot to verbose mode following this. That will scroll the boot log by as it starts and you can see error messages.