Dra Studio - Blog - Design & Illustration

Yesterday I fixed an iBook for Brittany Kopp:

Problem
Seconds after startup (before the ‘chime’) a Kernel Panic would occur, forcing Brittany to restart the machine.

Diagnosis
Could be an issue with a startup item, a corrupted font, or a something similar. It might be a hardware issue (i.e. memory failure), so it would be good to try booting into “Safe Mode” first.

(Sidenote: The machine was kinda dirty, which most likely unrelated, but it doesn’t hurt to return the machine cleaner than you found it).

1. Restarted machine in Safe Mode by pressing Power button and the Shift key at the same time.
2. Removed unnecessary installations of “AOL Instant Messenger” (yes, the AOL version, not iChat).
3. Checked “Login Items” in System Preferences, just to be sure there were no conflicts.
4. Ran Tiger version of Cocktail to check disk permissions, remove temporary files and caches, redo pre-bindings, etc.
5. Rebooted machine.

At this point, the iBook restarted but after the main loading window, the startup process was kicked back to the Darwin Single-User Mode and asked for a user login and password. Looks like the initial problem was corrected, but in the process, the link between the startup process and the Login Window had been misplaced/damaged. I have fixed this in the past by running an Mac OSX System Upgrade Installers so:

1. Rebooted the machine in Safe Mode.
2. It didn’t have an Airport Card, so I connected it via ethernet to a MacBook (turning ‘Internet Sharing’ on) to access the internet.
3. Ran Software Update and downloaded/installed all updates.
4. The machine rebooted and logged in with no problems.