At 9:31 AM -0500 2/18/2010, Richard Gerome wrote:
When I booted up my computer this morning
Exactly what computer is this? Details please.
the whole screen turned a dark grey with a view of my desktop in the back ground and a white window with black letters (everything went black and white) came up asking me to restart the computer holding down the start button for a few seconds?
As Kasey said in his reply - it's a Kernel Panic. A panic is when the whole OS crashes so badly it can no longer continue. Most often this is caused by a serious hardware problem - bad memory being the most common.
Is that Mac now running? If it is, use Console.app (in /Applications/Utilities/) to view the panic log. From that, you can often tell what failed.
Did/does that Mac BONG normally? The bong indicates the self-test passed. If it fails, you'll either hear nothing, or a chord or beeps - which indicate what failed.
I've been planning on doing a clean and reinstall soon because I bought this computer used a yr ago and it still has the orig owner as the admin, I just got a new Tiger install disc to do it.
Probably a good idea, but you should try to figure out what caused the panic first. No sense in introducing a software change when trying to debug a hardware problem.
HTH, - Dan. -- - Psychoceramic Emeritus; South Jersey, USA, Earth. -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
