Macbook Pro has panics and occasional coma!

Graham.R wrote:

This can be caused by using QuickLook on a folder of photos: I can look at maybe 15-10 images, and then the whole thing hangs and I get the spinning beachball of doom and have to wait maybe 5-10 minutes for things to become responsive again.

That sounds like a failing hard drive.

Sometimes it just does it randomly, particularly when I switch between applications, say Photoshop (CS4) and Firefox.

Here too.

I recently disabled 'hibernation' as the crash reports were showing the following line:

panic(cpu 0 caller 0xffffff802c47cc68): "Hibernate restore error e00002eb"@/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/xnu/xnu-3248.73.10/iokit/Kernel/IOHibernateIO.cpp:2320

...as I read somewhere that this might cure it,

I'm not sure which Library the error refers to, but I can't find the file Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/xnu/xnu-3248.73.10/iokit/Kernel/IOHibernateIO.cpp anywhere on the drive. I did wonder about creating it, just so that the system would be able to find a file to restore data to, even if it was empty... but perhaps I'm missing the point.

That is just the path to the original source code file embedded in the binary. It is just there to cross-reference with the original source code file to help debug the cause of the panic. If you really want to look at the file, for your 10.11.6 file, it is here:

https://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-3248.60.10/iokit/Kernel/IOHibernateIO.cpp.auto.html

Here is line 2320:

if ((kIOReturnSuccess == err) && (pagesDone == gIOHibernateCurrentHeader->actualUncompressedPages))
    	err = kIOReturnLockedRead;

    if (kIOReturnSuccess != err)
	panic("Hibernate restore error %x", err);

    gIOHibernateCurrentHeader->actualImage2Sum = sum;
    gIOHibernateCompression = gIOHibernateCurrentHeader->compression;

It's a decent machine, and with the SSD it should be no slouch, but it is, and it's the only machine I have right now. For the past 12 weeks I've been in lockdown 120 miles from my desktop machine and I don't know when we'll be able to go home! Some days I'm ready to throw it out of the window.

I'm afraid that is probably the best option - after restoring your backup to your new MacBook Pro, of course. 😀

I did read something on the net which suggested the internal SATA ribbon cable might be at fault, but I haven't tried changing that yet.

That is quite likely. However, it is an 8 year-old machine. I was only partially joking above. You need to make a Time Machine backup.

Do this now.

If anyone out there has any suggestions which don't involve replacing the Macbook with the latest model

You want suggestions other than the only obvious and guaranteed solution? Good luck with that.

Do not attempt to upgrade the machine. I expect that would be a spectacular failure and take all of your data with it.