[Sporty G]

Yesterday I had a friend over and I handed him a new, blank CD-RW so he could burn a copy of some archived media he had on his HD. He inserted the disc into his G4 iBook and instantly the system locked up. The screen went dark and a dialogue box appeared in the middle of the screen informing him, in multiple languages no less, that a serious error had occured and that the machine must be turned off.

Of course, this scared both of us as neither of us had seen anything like this prior. We rebooted the machine and the error returned. We eventually managed to remove the CD-RW media and the unit final rebooted normally. For kicks, I dropped the disc in the DVD-R drive of my G5 and BAM it locked up and displayed the same message, forcing me to perform a hard reboot. Even if the drives are incompatible with this particular HP CD-RW media, I'm still pretty shocked at the reaction of the OS. I'm glad I had no important apps. running in the background.

Oh wells. >_<

That was my first ever crash in the month I'v had my G5 and just the third my friend has had with his iBook in the 6 months he has owned it.

[bma_mat99]

Well, I have a powermac g5 dual 1.8ghz, and something similar happened to me. although the machine did not show any wierd dialong thingy, i could not eject the disk, no matter what i tried, and i had to restart the computer while holding this weird combination of keys for the drive to open up. It was also a cd-rw disk (maxwell version).

[Big Mac]

Well it certainly seems like there are some major holes in Apple's documentation, since so many have no idea what the kernel panic dialog is. The dimmed dialog that tells you to restart your computer in multiple languages is a kernel panic. A kernel panic is the result of OS X's lowest level software (the kernel) receiving data it does not know how to handle. Sometimes it is the result of a software error (like the abomination Norton Systemworks causes), while other times hardware is at fault. It is certainly uncommon for a blank CD to trigger a kernel panic, and since it happened to two different machines I would be tempted to call that an OS bug. If you still have the CD, you should definitely send it over to Apple.