Help me see if I can fix my Macbook Pro before I hand it over to a Genius.

October 2, 2007 10:19 PM

Help me see if I can fix my Macbook Pro before I hand it over to a Genius.

Yesterday my Macbook Pro (with the latest updates) beach balled on me when I was trying to load a page in Firefox. Being that I couldn't bring up the apple menu or even try to get Force Quit open, I forced the system to shutdown by holding the power button down.

I'm now getting the kernel panic window on boot (http://www.macmaps.com/kernelpanic102.jpg).

I've booted with the install disk and checked the disk with disk utility and it said that there were no errors to the disk. Did a repair anyways and again, there were no problems.

Is there anything else that I should try before I hand it to a Genius? Did I just fry the OS and need to reinstall it? Is there a way for me to get my data off the drive if that's the only option available to me? (my secondary machine is a win xp box, btw).

posted by missed to computers & internet (8 comments total)

reinstalling the OS is dead simple. If you've got enough free disk space, it will even keep your old user accounts, apps, and system settings. I reinstalled mine on Sunday; firefox could still autocomplete metafilter for me, I didn't have to set up Mail again (all my old messages were there!) and all of my documents were spot-on. I'd highly suggest giving that a shot if you've got the disk space to spare. If not, get a friend to pull your most valuable data off of the disk and wipe it clean.
posted by tylermoody at 11:01 PM on October 2, 2007

did you just follow the install disk screens no problem, or create a partition or am i just making it too difficult heh
posted by missed at 11:09 PM on October 2, 2007

you need to go here.
posted by krautland at 11:11 PM on October 2, 2007

Interesting. I had the exact same thing happen to me a few weeks ago. I was running FF, it choked on me (beachballed), then froze, I forced a restart, and the machine barfed. This was on an old G3 iBook running 10.4.

I ended up having to run Disk Warrior on the HD, and then boot from a CD and create a new user. For some reason the problem -- freezing on boot -- was restricted to my old user. When I made a new admin user, I could boot up OK. But even if I deleted and recreated the old user, it would freeze on boot if I tried to log in as it. This struck me as a bit spooky, but I swear that's how it is. (I don't know if this much of the problem will be the same on your system; I think it depends on what files got corrupted when the machine froze. Yours may be better or worse.)

Probably your best solution is going to be an Archive and Install. I didn't do that because the discs I had were 10.2, and the machine has 10.4 on it now, and I can't find the silly 10.4 upgrade disc...hence the weird new-user hack. But that's the best solution and ought to preserve your user data, preferences, etc. If you can, boot into Target Disk mode and backup everything first, though.

You're not the only person FF has done that to, though. I wonder if it's a common problem?
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:50 PM on October 2, 2007

many thanks! i'm back in after installing the OS, my files are indeed there. and i did create a second account and it does seem to run better, so i'm going to back up everything, try an erase/full reinstall, and then see if that improves things because boot seems to still act funny.
posted by missed at 1:00 AM on October 3, 2007

It can't be a mac help thread without telling you to repair permissions. It's the mac equivalent of rebooting.
posted by oxford blue at 6:17 AM on October 3, 2007

permissions returned no errors in disk utility :D

i did the archive and reinstall. seemed to go okay, but when i opened firefox to test the theory that that broke my OS the mac froze again. so at this time i'm thinking this wonderful app is breaking me :(
posted by missed at 7:49 AM on October 3, 2007

Have you tried using something like appzapper to completely uninstall then reinstall (make sure to backup your bookmarks). Is it a particular page, or just generally that this is happening in?

It's not really a solution, but does the problem occur when using camino?
posted by oxford blue at 8:41 PM on October 5, 2007