Lion randomly crashes - black screen

@i005754 & UCLAMac

Just checking, did you guys simply (or plan to) buy a drive, unscrew the screws on the back of your macbookpro and swap the drive then re-install using timemachine or carboncopy clone etc? I assume there is no problem with void warranty etc? If so i might have to do the same thing. I don't want to risk messing up this lion install via rollback etc as it has all my work data on it.

also, just remember a 7200 rpm drive will probably use more battery power than a 5400 rpm

Also i submitted kernel panic logs and system profile attachments etc via http://bugreport.apple.com/, haven't heard anything. I also replied to the apple contact email a few people got via this thread. I sent kernel panic logs to them also but haven't heard anything...

As soon as this tax reporting project i'm working on is finished i'll be taking this machine to an apple "genius" and see what they say about the constant crashes. I will disable gfxCardStatus first of course!

gfxCardStatus seems to allow somewhat normal function, however certain apple programs (pages, app store, photobooth) seem to crash no matter what. As a lifelong Apple user this experience has lead me to build a PC as at least then I can install drivers myself...

Hi Wired. My plan was / is about as basic as they come. Remove screws, replace drive, insert screws, insert original 10.6 installation media, re-install.

I suspect that I am in a similar position to you. The mb pro is now my primary work machine and I have a lot of code, documents and virtual machine images on it. This evening I dumped almost everything I care about onto my NAS, so I suppose the only real barrier to a working 10.6 system is a 90.00 hard-drive, a 15 minute real drive and a few hours to get my environments setup again.

As for the warranty... I am not certain, but it seems unlikely that a Genius appointment will yield decent results. Personal experience and posts on this forum support the notion that we will be asked to 'perform a clean install on an official Apple hard-drive'. I don't think the Apple store staff really understand that some of us use these machines to do real work, and asking us to reinstall / rewind is very unappealing. Like you, I would prefer to keep the upgraded Lion drive intact on the offchance that I have missed something.

up voting this issue:

this post's content is:

probably not interesting for the thread.

hopefully helpful, interesting, incentivizing for apple:

MacBookPro6,2

Boot ROM Version: MBP61.0057.B0C

SMC Version (system): 1.58f16

in snow leopard: I would get the black screen, keyboard lit, unresponsive laptop, once a week? more often? hard to say.

Anoying, but I was forced to live with it.

in lion:

I am in constant fear that my next click/key-stroke is going to send it into the black screen.

It's probably happened at every sitting.

Probably multiple times per sitting.

It has happened during login

It has happened during right click exiting a program from the dock.

It has happened entering expose.

When it happened:

I've had a second monitor (apple) plugged in

I was using an external keyboard and mouse.

It may be superstition, but it seems to not happen as regularly if I use the laptops keyboard/mouse.

I think, this is fairly typical:

Kernel Extensions in backtrace:

com.apple.NVDAResman(7.0.2)[7E65ECA2-D3A1-35F8-B845-C975FB531E7E]@0xffffff7f808b2000->0xffffff7f80b8 8fff

dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily(2.6.5)[95ABB490-3AB5-3D5E-9C21-67089A9AE6A1]@0xffff ff7f8083e000

dependency: com.apple.iokit.IONDRVSupport(2.3)[E99C8907-946D-3F1A-A261-4C0F2D5D0451]@0xffff ff7f808a0000

dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily(2.3)[897EB322-FD55-36D7-A68E-9E9C34A74A84]@0xf fffff7f80868000

com.apple.nvidia.nv50hal(7.0.2)[2E84958C-1EEC-316B-9F7A-68C368F83476]@0xffffff7f80b89000->0xffffff7f80ea afff

dependency: com.apple.NVDAResman(7.0.2)[7E65ECA2-D3A1-35F8-B845-C975FB531E7E]@0xffffff7f808 b2000

com.apple.GeForce(7.0.2)[18E50F21-1E7F-3FFE-B298-7CD7A11879F8]@0xffffff7f817bc000->0xffffff7f8187 8fff

Apple, thanks for looking into this.

Let me know how I can help.

@ Mike , yep i'm in the same boat. I was irregularly getting the black screen KP in Snow leopard sometimes multiple times in a day sometimes not but *atleast* once a week. Tried taking to apple and no use, was effectively told there's nothing wrong

Since Lion I'm getting it over and over unless I use gfxCardStatus on integrated mode.

Just please make sure to submit the issue to apple each time you restart and also submit the bug via bugreport.apple.com

@wierd00 @Mike,

Same here, in Snow Leopard I started getting occasional crash like this when connected to external monitor and typically following heavy load.

Was concerned about hardware issues, but apple repair center had it for 3 days and cleared faulty hardware as a cause.

So now its clear that there are and have been issues with Nvidia drivers or even GPU itself especially on mid 2010 MBP models.

Bug report opened with Apple 9847322!

Submited each and every crash dump to apple so far

far out. 3 times today i've seen a wierd glitchy checkerboard effect all over my screen. I can move the mouse but everything else is unresponsive and frozen. I can't force quit and even closing the lid doesn't put the machine to sleep. This is the sort of thing you see when a PC video card is crashed or overheated. well my macbook pro experience is going bad to worse... why do we pay $2500 for this?

Same for me. Had occassional black screens in Snow Leopard. Now it blackscreens every few minutes.

gfxCardStatus doesn't seem to help much. It seems to switch back to discrete mode sometimes..

MB Pro 2010 GeForce GT 330M.

What are your experiences on BootCamp?

I thought Windows was crash free until just a few minutes ago when it suddenly went black.

Could be a strange coincidence.. but if it's not this must be a hardware issue.

BTW: Would be nice to hear something from Apple. I lose a lot of money if I can't work on my computer.

my parents computer is having all these issues but its not nvidia GT 330m

they have a nvidia 9400 and 9600

Add me to this thread. Second partition added to internal HD on MacBook Pro i7, fresh install of Lion on second partition.

Running without any system add-ons results in regular black screen crash/freezes, usually within 10-15 minutes of initial login.

Using gfxCardStatus seemed to delay the condition, but after letting the machine go to sleep, found same unrecoverable black screen condition when trying to wake.

Log files not reviewed yet.

Reported via Apple Feedback: http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

Me as well. I run Lion on a 2009 27" iMac i5 with 12GB of RAM. I have experienced more than 18 crashes since updating to Lion. As a possible cause, I have noticed that Lion will always crash if there is a blip in your internet and it goes away for a second. Possibly Lion was never given a full set of contingencies for when Internet goes away suddenly.

But that cannot be the only reason, because it has crashed plenty of times when that wasn't the cause.

Also having the same issue with random screen going black on my Mid 2010 MBP. Upgrade to Lion several days ago. Seems not to happen if I have a second monitor plugged in. Can't put it to sleep (closing the lid). Have to do a hard restart.

I'm having all these issues too. Macbook pro mid-2010 i7 8Gs RAM, 500G.

gfxCardStatus seems to alleviate the symptoms a bit though.

Has anyone tried downloading and installing the Nvidia 330M SNOW LEOPARD drivers from the Nvidia website???

The .dmg is available on their website. I'm wondering if it will fix the issue, since I was not getting those crashes on snow leopard.

Not sure if this is appropriate in this discussion, but I was having constant kernel panics after upgrading to Lion.

What "seems" to have fixed them for me (I say "seems" as I have not had one for about four hours which might be a bit too soon for a definite fix...) was to remove the Elmedia Kernel extension if you happen to have it installed:

com.eltima.ElmediaPlayer.kext

from System>Library>Extensions

I have had like everyone else here a very unstable system. Most of the time it wouldn't even let me do anything past logging in. I repaired permissions, repaired disk, reinstalled,... same thing. Also, I almost consistently had a frozen system every time I tried to log in from the screensaver screen.

Finally I have had a stable (but slow) system for 24h with extreme use.

- I have logged in while pressing shift (only way to really log in)

- I have installed gfxCardStatus and kept it at integrated

- installed smcfancontrol and set it to Higher RPM

However the system is slow. I can't even do any image processing without grabbing a coffee during the 'processing' step.

I am now switching to the discrete only setting of gfx and will let you know what happens. Crossing fingers and clicking the gfx discrete option.