Lion randomly crashes - black screen

Hmm, havent heard of that before...

Did you 'show package contents' install them that way? If not, thats the ony way to get it to install on a non-Mac Pro, despite it having new drivers for all systems.

Hi Gen,

I updated my Nvidia Driver with showing package contents and now i can't even boot my Mac even for once 😟 After Apple logo appears, it gets restarted and this loop continues forever 😟 I feel totally doomed.

Okay, this means that the binaries of your original drivers were corrupt to start with. The Nvidia drivers still rely on them until your Mac actually loads Lion, altering them to point to the new drivers on startup could have corrupted them further to the point where they became unusable.

What you will need to do is archive and reinstall. You won't need to delete or format your hard drive, just install Lion againf rom your backup partition. This will delete and re-copy the drivers from your backup partition. It should hopefully work without error then. Otherwise you either have serious program conflicts (never happens on Mac) or the dreaded TS4088.

Well, I'm a PC girl and i was told that my life would be super easy if I switch it to Mac. Now i feel desperate and frustrated. 🙂 I'm not sure if i have any back up partition, I don't know how to re-install. All I've done is upgrading my Mac from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion, and now I can't even boot my system up. I'm used to **** like this on PC, but clearly my opinios about Apple and its software / hardware integrity has changed. I feel dissappointed. Thank you for your time. I'm going to try to find a descent re-seller in my country and try to solve this problem.

I'm sorry to hear that. It's really easy to do on a Mac. All you have to do is hold Command+R on startup and follow the prompts. Shouldn't take long, it just repairs your Mac via the wonders of the internet!

okay, after 5 days of ML, the crash is here. however, ML seems to be more polite: it reboots automatically with a message 🙂. but the panic report is the same. okay, I'm taking it for LB replacement

see my previous post about how to reproduce the problem. i think you could reproduce it easily, without having to wait 5 days while using the machine.

if fixing this with software was possible, they would have already done that in some update. if it was software, it wouldn't be that hard to track down the problem and fix it.

jvjv wrote:

see my previous post about how to reproduce the problem. i think you could reproduce it easily, without having to wait 5 days while using the machine.

if fixing this with software was possible, they would have already done that in some update. if it was software, it wouldn't be that hard to track down the problem and fix it.

don't get me wrong, it was 5 days of stress testing 🙂 and then it happened just out of the blue... I think while 4088 is an issue, the symptoms might differ slightly machine to machine, with possibly some of the mid 2010 series being OK.

actually, it would not. the same as for SW, if they could track a HW problem, they would have found a solution. They did not, they are just replacing the Logic Boards which contain the GPU. a lot of people actually have to replace the LB over and over again, which is ridiculous. I understand they don't want to actually 'upgrade' the machines with 2011 models, but I feel like that actually is the only solution and there is NO solution to 4088. you can be lucky and the the new LB might work okay, but it's not a universal solution. there's none exept a totally different GPU

jvjv, you are my hero!

I just booked my appointment for the Genius Bar.

It would have been nice if they had sent out a recall email.

I too am Booked in at apple appointment! I have to black screen of death in my 2010 Macbook Pro 15" i5 /330M video card... however using the GFXcardstatus is set to the descrete card as I get my problems from the integrated one? when I try to switch it to only integrated a get a total screen flicker and looks like black n white plaid scramble the cleans up after hard drive stops cycling them CLICK! black screen of death! all started when upgrading to lion... mountainlion made it much worse!

Thanks, Dennis. I was about to make the purchace in the hopes of a fix.

I am having the problem with the i7 CPU, but it just goes blank and into a kernel panic.

I turned on the "auto reboot on panic" option it happens so often.

here is a small video of what mine is doing... http://www.palmbeachroasters.com/Palm_Beach_Roasters/Movie.html then a black screen crash afterwards...

no problem, man. hope you'll soon get the free replacement.

now, check this out (!):

Apple has UPDATED the TS4088.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4088

As of July 31, the recall is now valid for 3 YEARS after the purchase date.

Great news, jvjv. I'll try to get mine replaced. I've been avoiding it because of threat that I would have to pay the service fee (approx $150/£120 in Sweden), but now that it's crashing more than ever, I have no choice. Doesn't matter that I bought myself a PC because of all the trouble, I can't have a super expensive computer collecting dust...

Three years! That is really great news!

I'm going to book a genius too, even though it's a two hour travel it seems the only way. I've already tried everything else. Lets hope they can refund the €90 it has cost me to have a local service center test my mac for problems too (they could not find any problem, even though I showed it crashing and lots of logs).