[X Newbies] System Crash

[Scott]

On Nov 15, 2003, at 8:11 PM, Steven Rogers wrote:

>
> On Saturday, November 15, 2003, at 09:57 PM, J wrote:
>
>> How can I find information about why my system crashed?
>
> Looks like you've already decided that its lack of memory below
>
>> It made a horrendous noise and a translucent screen came up with 
>> restart instructions on it. I know it's lack of memory but there is 
>> no way to allocate to this so how do I fix that?
>
> A little more detail would be in order - like what you were doing at 
> the time, anything new installed lately, has the machine been 
> generally unstable, etc.
>
> Just posting "my machine crashed - why is that?" is kind of like 
> posting "I lost my car keys - where are they?"
>

True,. She  did give us enough information to know that a kernel panic 
occurred. Kernel panic logs can usually be found in 
/Library/Logs/panic.log . The log may or may not provide any 
human-decipherable information. Most is useful only in testing in a 
debugging environment.


This one, for instance, has one section in particular which may help:
-----------------
panic(cpu 0): 0x400 - Inst access
Latest stack backtrace for cpu 0:
       Backtrace:
          0x000833B8 0x0008389C 0x0001ED8C 0x00090800 0x00093A6C
Proceeding back via exception chain:
    Exception state (sv=0x21416280)
       PC=0x00000000; MSR=0x40009030; DAR=0x002CA278; DSISR=0x40000000; 
LR=0x0025EB48; R1=0x128CB8C0; XCP=0x00000010 (0x400 - Inst access)
       Backtrace:
          0x0024B2C0 0x240705BC 0x0028B784 0x0028B5F0 0x002479D8 
0x00247A2C 0x00079214 0x00079284
          0x00021660 0x00013A28 0x000219F0 0x00041104 0x000163B4 
0x000187A0 0x00019FE0 0x0002FDE0
          0x00208260 0x002080E8 0x0023DAA4 0x00093C00 0x703A2F2F
       Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
          com.apple.iokit.ApplePCCardATA(1.0.3f1)@0x2406f000
             dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOATAFamily(1.5.5f1)@0x20427000
    Exception state (sv=0x209B9A00)
       PC=0x90034F4C; MSR=0x0000D030; DAR=0x0108B9B0; DSISR=0x40000000; 
LR=0x9002C8EC; R1=0xBFFFE820; XCP=0x00000030 (0xC00 - System call)

Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 7.0.0:
Wed Sep 24 15:48:39 PDT 2003; root:xnu/xnu-517.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC

-------------------

This part:

>       Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
>          com.apple.iokit.ApplePCCardATA(1.0.3f1)@0x2406f000
>             dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOATAFamily(1.5.5f1)@0x20427000

Points to a PC Card being the culprit. In this case, I can combine the 
information Steve suggests to come up with a cause.
At the time, I'd been inserting and removing a PC Card Compact Flash 
reader. If I recall correctly, I'd not been terribly nice about doing 
so - didn't unmount it. For that matter, I might have removed or 
inserted it when the machine was asleep. It's been a while.



-- 
Scott