[Tom C]

After going almost a year with only two kernel panics (and none since the release of 10.2.6), I've had two in a week. Both occurred when I went to dial-up my modem.

I'm assuming that a driver is corrupted. It would be pretty easy to figure out the problem if I had the kernel panic logs. However, both times, even though I got the Jaguar kernel panic screen (no dump on screen), the kernel panic dump was not saved to disk (or, at least, it didn't appear in Apple System Profiler).

1. Is there anywhere where the KP log could be saved that Apple System Profiler wouldn't find it?

2. If I'm concerned that the dump may not get written to disk, is there any way to force the dump to get written to the screen after the Jaguar KP screen appears?

3. Why would the dump not get written to disk if I get the Jaguar KP screen?

[retroneo]

It reads in from NVRAM and writes it to disk at boot time. Also, i understand some machines no longer have enough free NVRAM to keep this info. Plenty of things can cause it not to be written to NVRAM in the first place (as panic-time is a pretty unreliable state!!). It isn't uncommon for a kernel panic log to not be not able to be written to disk.

You can enable the old screen backtrace by typing:

sudo nvram boot-args="debug=0x144"

in the Terminal, entering you password and then rebooting.


David

Originally posted by Tom C:
After going almost a year with only two kernel panics (and none since the release of 10.2.6), I've had two in a week. Both occurred when I went to dial-up my modem.

I'm assuming that a driver is corrupted. It would be pretty easy to figure out the problem if I had the kernel panic logs. However, both times, even though I got the Jaguar kernel panic screen (no dump on screen), the kernel panic dump was not saved to disk (or, at least, it didn't appear in Apple System Profiler).

1. Is there anywhere where the KP log could be saved that Apple System Profiler wouldn't find it?

2. If I'm concerned that the dump may not get written to disk, is there any way to force the dump to get written to the screen after the Jaguar KP screen appears?

3. Why would the dump not get written to disk if I get the Jaguar KP screen?

[wadesworld]

Note that if you do so, you'll be stuck either writing down the trace by hand, or needing to take a digital picture of the screen.

But if you're getting no trace, something is better than nothing.

You might also want to find out how to restore the default behavior.

Wade

[nbnz]

Originally posted by Tom C:
After going almost a year with only two kernel panics (and none since the release of 10.2.6), I've had two in a week. Both occurred when I went to dial-up my modem.

I've had the same problem! My 12"PowerBook (10.2.6) was crashing regularly after dialing in the modem...I reinstalled the OS on the weekend and (touch wood) so far it's been OK.

[Tom C]

Originally posted by retroneo:


You can enable the old screen backtrace by typing:

sudo nvram boot-args="debug=0x144"

in the Terminal, entering you password and then rebooting.

If I decide to switch back to the Jaguar KP screen later, how do I do it?

Thanks for the help.

[Moonray]

Originally posted by retroneo:
... Also, i understand some machines no longer have enough free NVRAM to keep this info...

Is there somewhere a list of these machines?

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