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Mac Forum / Programming / Perl / November 2004[OT] Black Screen of Death
Sometimes, usually when I get to my desk in the morning, my mac has a black screen with scrolling white text (that I've yet to actually read). No way to stop it that I know of short of unplugging the computer and starting back up. Anyone else experiencing this? PowerMac, G4 1.25, Mirrored Doors, OS X 10.3.5, 768 megs ram. Kindest Regards, Bill Stephenson 417-546-5593 >Sometimes, usually when I get to my desk in the morning, my mac has a >black screen with scrolling white text (that I've yet to actually >read). No way to stop it that I know of short of unplugging the >computer and starting back up. That sounds, almost certainly, like a kernel panic. Run Disk Utility/Disk Warrior first of all but in my only experience of KPs mine was caused by a defective mouse so you'll need to note the text on screen to diagnose what's causing it. Regards, Phil. > On 17/10/2004 @ 13:57 +0100, Bill Stephenson, bills@perlhelp.com, > wrote: [quoted text clipped - 12 lines] > > Phil. Thanks for tip Phil. I was hoping that the error might be found in one of the Console logs. It's difficult to read the text that's scrolling on the screen because it's moving so darn fast, my old eyes aren't very good anymore, and I tend to get those pesky "Optic Migraines" when I stare at anything that strobes or has significant glare, and of course, David points out the other obvious reason below.... On Oct 17, 2004, at 8:09 AM, David Cantrell wrote: > Did you not consider for one moment that perhaps that text might help > you to solve whatever's going on, before wasting our time? Idiot. Of course I did. Geez, if I only had the omnipotent David Cantrel looking over my shoulder he could solve this in a nanosecond. I'm sure he scored incredibly high on his Evelyn Wood courses and even Albert Einstien would blush in his grave if he knew of his magnificent intelligence. I apologize for wasting your time David. Here's a tip for you, make a "Rule" in your "Mail.app" that moves messages from me into your "Trash" or "Junk" directories. Kindest Regards, Bill > I was hoping that the error might be found in one of the Console logs. It ought to be in one of the logs, yes. Sorry that I don't remember which. Check in /var/logs List by time, so you can tell which files were written most recently: ls -latT (IIRC. might want to man ls if that set of options doesn't work.) Some of the files are binary, but I'm pretty sure the most important ones are text. Oh, and run this command first: last That is not all, but it' all off the top of my head this AM. > It's difficult to read the text that's scrolling on the screen > because it's moving so darn fast, my old eyes aren't very good > anymore, and I tend to get those pesky "Optic Migraines" when I stare > at anything that strobes or has significant glare, ... -- Joel Rees Getting involved in the neighbor's family squabbles is dangerous. But if the abusive partner has a habit of shooting through his/her roof, the guy who lives upstairs is in a bit of a catch-22. On Oct 17, 2004, at 7:57 AM, Bill Stephenson wrote: > Sometimes, usually when I get to my desk in the morning, my mac has a > black screen with scrolling white text > It ought to be in one of the logs, yes. Sorry that I don't remember > which. Check in > > /var/logs Well, it did it again this morning. I did my best to read the text but there isn't much in it that provides a clue to me... backtrace terminated unaligned frame address 0x003362B8 There were some other strings in the same line containing numbers that proceeded the above but I really had a hard time reading them and they may have been changing slightly as it was scrolling along. I know this last part "0x003362B8" of the string above did change several times while I tried to copy it to paper. I could be wrong, but it seems to happen more often after I open Photoshop cs and/or ImageReady cs. GoLive is a little buggy and it too may be contributing to this, but I haven't noticed it directly and I have it open more often than the others. Running the tests Joel mentions provided this: -rw-r----- 1 root wheel 58373 4 Nov 05:10:44 2004 windowserver_last.log -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 233931 4 Nov 03:15:20 2004 daily.out -rw-r----- 1 root admin 2392 4 Nov 03:15:14 2004 system.log.0.gz So I ran this... Bill-Stephensons-Computer:/var/log root# tail -200 windowserver_last.log Nov 04 04:44:59 [186] kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGXRemoveTrackingArea : Invalid tracking area Nov 04 04:44:59 [186] kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGXRemoveTrackingArea : Invalid tracking area Nov 04 04:44:59 [186] kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGXRemoveTrackingArea : Invalid tracking area Which continued on for 194 more lines until it ended with this... Nov 04 05:10:29 [186] kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGXRemoveTrackingArea : Invalid tracking area Nov 04 05:10:29 [186] kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGXRemoveTrackingArea : Invalid tracking area Nov 04 05:10:30 [186] kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGXPostEventByConnection: invalid connection None of which helps me locate what's causing this "Black Screen of Death". Anyone here gain any insight from these messages? Kindest Regards, Bill Stephenson > Well, it did it again this morning. I did my best to read the text but > there isn't much in it that provides a clue to me... > > backtrace terminated unaligned frame address 0x003362B8 That's part of the standard kernel panic message - it doesn't say much about what caused the panic. Have a look in the panic log - it's probably something like /var/log/panic.log, but honestly it's been so long since I've had a kernel panic that I don't recall. List the contents of /var/log, or grep the files in that directory for 'backtrace terminated'. A bit of googling found this link: <http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-42673> The consensus in the above was - bad RAM. If you have any third-party RAM in your machine, you might want to try removing it for a while to see if that fixes the problem. If it doesn't, take your Mac in for repair - kernel panics are nearly always the result of a hardware failure of some sort. sherm-- |
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