On May 12, 2005, at 10:01 PM, Greg Schoettmer lamented: > ?????I have absolutely NOTHING attached to my Mac. Not even a > printer. Not a wireless network card. Nada! I pulled out the Mac book > last night and it gave me the same explanation that you have. > Unfortunately it?s having a kernel fit every time I try to shut down. > ?I?ve only had this computer a couple of months so I?m going to call > Apple tonight and see what?s up.
My suspicion is that most kernel panics can be traced to something messed up on a hard drive. For example, often, a kernel panic results when the operating system cannot read or write to a swap file. A kernel panic on shutdown could be caused by one of files needed to properly shut the system down being damaged, having the wrong permissions, or gone missing entirely. Kernel panics are quite rare, and I don't think they're often caused by bad peripherals. They might be caused by bad or mismatched drivers for those peripherals, but even that is more likely to freeze up the machine than cause a kernel panic. This is because a kernel panic is usually caused when the Darwin kernel receives an instruction with the wrong format, or tries to write information to a memory address that isn't there, such as in a damaged swap file. The only kernel panic I can recall with Mac OS X came when a power failure messed up my hard drive. My advice is to throw a disk utility or two at the hard drive and check it for bad blocks, permission problems and messed up directories. If this doesn't help, wipe the drive and reinstall the operating system because this will certainly replace a damaged file, and, if the drive has a problem, it'll likely show up when you try to move around a few thousand files during an operating system install. | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be May 24. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu> | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>
