"You need to restart your computer. Hold down the power button for several seconds."

[naturallight]

I have a 4 year old MacBook Pro. When I turn it on, I get these crazy vertical bars and an error message that says "You need to restart your computer. Hold down the power button for several seconds."

Here is a pic: http://postimage.org/image/km2h59plz/


Every time I restart the computer, it gives me the same error. I tried holding down Command, Option, P, and R, but no luck. Is there anything I can do?

 

[JediMeister]

Follow these steps until you have determined whether it's software or hardware.

 

[Ivan P]

What you're getting is called a Kernel Panic (the Mac version of Windows' Blue Screen of Death). It generally signifies some form of hardware issue or failure.

 

[naturallight]

Thanks for the replies everybody. I took it into the Apple store this morning. They said it was a hardware issue--my graphics card failed. I guess this was a wide scale issue with nVidia so Apple was fixing it free of charge for certain model years, but of course mine is too old by 6 months. So it would be $310 to fix. dang