[finboy]

When running the restore cds the other night, I got a popup box several times that said "you must restart, hold down the Power key" or something like that. What is that an indicator of? It didn't really restore anything, come to find out, and I ended up reformatting and going back to the original setup (10.2.4 and 9.2.2).

Same thing happened when I tried to empty the trash, a couple of times. Is it a Permissions thing?

Any war stories would be appreciated -- I hate using a new OS.

[Zadian]

That's a kernel panic - something went wrong up to a point were the system can do nothing. The cause of a kernel panic an be defective hardware (defective RAM) or software (bad drivers, corrupted filesystem, corrupted system installation...).

[Judge_Fire]

Also, if you have any unnecessary devices connected to the USB or FireWire ports of your machine, try the restore without them.

Every kernel panic I've experienced has occurred when fiddling with a peripheral device, like the iSight.

J

[finboy]

Thanks for the info.

No peripherals connected at the time, or even installed yet.

I think it was a corrupted file system, but I'd hate to think that the only way to fix it is to go all the way back to a virgin machine. Scary.

[Millennium]

That's called a kernel panic. Usually it means something is wrong with the hardware.

Unfortunately, the box itself doesn't give much of an indication of exactly what's wrong. OSX 10.2 and higher save a much more detailed record of what went wrong to your hard drive; unfortunately I don't remember where it is. If someone here knows, could you post the location?

Once we know where the log is, you can cut/paste it into here. There are quite a few people here who can read these things, at least to a limited degree, and they might be able to pinpoint what is wrong.

[proton]

The panic log is stored in /Library/Logs/panic.log

- proton