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My 2009 mac mini randomly reboots. It is running OS X El Capitan 10.11.6

Hi everyone, a few weeks ago my mac mini started randomly rebooting. sometimes it automatically loads to the sign in screen and works just fine. However, most of times it either freezes on a gray screen with an apple logo, or it reboots multiple times and never gets to the sign in screen, or it freezes in a gray screen with a big "ø" symbol with some text over it saying basically that the computer experienced a problem.

The following images are of the report that appears when the computer starts again.

I don’t understand anything of what it says.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Posted on Apr 29, 2021 5:42 AM

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Posted on Apr 29, 2021 12:27 PM

If your Mac spontaneously restarts or displays a message that it restarted or shut down because of a problem, click here --> https://support.apple.com/HT200553


Are you using a new peripheral? Something to do with MSDOS?

3 replies

Apr 29, 2021 4:57 PM in response to _TTRZ

MSDOS is the precursor to Windows. You can still see it associated with using FAT formatted flash drives which often come with a Windows default format. MSDOS was indicated as the last loaded kext before the crash. I was wondering if you had some old thing on there that was invoking the kext that provided a service for DOS format.


Kernel Panics can have either software or hardware causes. It is usually easy to spot a software one, particularly if a kext load points to an old or badly coded piece of software. Hardware ones are tougher to spot because you just have to associate them with the computer doing something when it crashes.


You can try running your computer in Safe Mode and see if it stops it. On the other hand, running in safe mode is very restrictive and not fun after a minute or two.


I recently had a set of KPs on my computer and I eventually tracked them down to a particular piece of software i would leave running. I stopped running it except when absolutely necessary and the issue cleared up. You could see if you can associate yours with something that way.

My 2009 mac mini randomly reboots. It is running OS X El Capitan 10.11.6

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