[Macpartners] Have you experience a black screen with restart MAC message on a MACBook Pro or MAC Mini?

[Patrick M McNeal]

On Jan 26, 2010, at 3:40 PM, Olimpia Estela Caceres-Brown wrote:

I have a couple of MACBook Pros and a MAC Mini that suddenly freeze with the following message:
“You need to restart your computer  hold down the Power button until it turns off then press the Power button again.”

If I power off and on the MACBook Pros, they works fine, and the Mac Mini  works fine when I connected to another LCD.

Any suggestion or tips to solve this problem will greatly appreciate.

What you're seeing is a kernel panic: something on the computer is causing an error that the OS can't handle, causing it to lock up.  Apple has a pretty good article that goes into more detail on these:

  http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1392

To figure out what's causing the problem, you need to check the kernel panic logs.  On 10.6 they're located in in /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports, while in 10.2 - 10.5, they're located in /Library/Logs/PanicReporter.  If there's a specific application that's causing the problem, you might try uninstalling it to see if the problem goes away.  If that doesn't work, I'd begin going through Apple's "Isolating issues in Mac OS X" process, documented here:

  http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1388

Sometimes, it's as simple as re-installing a third-party application, while in the worst case, you might need to reinstall the OS.

Hope that helps.

--Patrick

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Patrick McNeal
Macintosh Platform Coordinator
ISDA, Information Services and Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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