Lion randomly crashes - black screen

I just started in safe boot ( shift key on chime on startup) and i have not had a crash.. I see the apple store tomorrow morning but at least I can check my emails and its crash free! whew! I can now move files onto my backup also so in case apple decides they want to format my HD..

Dennis,

Download the gfxStatus program. Using it to force internal only GPU may help you avoid safe boot until you can get the fix. Past versions of this program had some issues, but it seems to work better now.

yip i already have this, for me though it worked better when set to the descrete 330M card and in energy saver set to automatic switching... THEN ran

gfxstatus... worked fair at best! but at least i was able to setup an appoinemt for genius bar... i went today and in fact after apple ran the MRI test it showed the failure... now im getting a new logic board! At the apple store the guy up front said he knew about the problem but mine was the first one hed got to see in person with this issue!

Is by any chance anyone located in the Netherlands having this problem? I think it would help if I can refer to an earlier case about the same issue because it seems a lot of apple support people don't know about this issue nor how to handle it.

Yeah, everybody should disregard my last post about gfxStatus. It's about as hit-or-miss as the OS on its own. I have found that sometimes if a particular app is constantly crashing (like Bodega) a forced mode can help. Today I tried to manually switch to internal at boot up, and I got your crazy "stripey screen" effect for the first time.

So, to any of you others out there, I have seen some weirdness that occasionally happens.

After your BSOD reboot, sometimes the background of the screen has the wrong image. Attempts to put it back right may or may not succeed. For instnce it may tell you the background is the correct picture, when in fact it is not! After a reboot, everything seems to go back to normal. Any of you gurus want to meditate on that one?

😝

I'm happy to hear about your success, Dennis. Ninety minutes until my appointment....

Best to print out and refer to the Knowledge Base article TS4088 on your visit:

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

Okay so ive been having the black death of screen problem and im really worried as i live in Oman. It's a country in the middle east and there is not a single f**** apple store in the whole of the middle east so replacing the LB is out of the question for me and there seems to be no real DIY solution to this. I am really disappointed in Apple and am not gonna buy a mac ever again. I have noticed something unusual though. Whenever i start up on windows 7 on the boot camp partition, this issue never happens so i find it odd to be hardware problem 😟

Also i recently upgrade to Mountain lion in hopes that it would solve the problem but it only got worse. Now i cant even keep my MBP turned on for 5 minutes without crashing 😟

I know how you feel. I live in Venezuela and we don't have Apple Stores here as well. I bought my MBP through Apple's Online Store and had it shipped to my brother's in Florida. So I guess I'm out of luck too until I fly to the US and book an appointment.

As many people have claimed before, I use gfxCardStatus, and Caffeine and removed everything with "windowserver" in it. It is not 100% foolproof, but at least, I can use my laptop for several hours withouth any crashes.

Does anybody know a solution for the LB replacement for those countries where there are no Apple Stores? Apple has resellers but I don't know if those will be able to perform the replacement at Apple's cost.

This is the reason I decided to do finally go in... is it possible to ship your apple to apple for repair? Mine was so bad

it even scrambled the screen and once loaded would go black... I booted up in safe mode and could at least use

laptop limping along to move some recently made files ... The apple

tech was very nice and once

he found out it was a recall he took it in for replacement... hope you can resolve yours too!

Thank you for your reply Dennis. Actually my brother, who lives in Florida will be in town in a little over a month. I'm going to ask him to take it with him to the Apple Store for the replacement. Then, I'll figure out how to get it back.

Thankyou for your response, i thought i was the only one in this situation and i cant believe that apple cant place one in Venezuela. Another thing which infuriates me is the fact that apple missed a whole **** REGION of asia, the whole of middle-east. I hope that your laptop gets repaired ASAP 🙂 and good luck.

FWIW, turning off discrete graphics isn't always be-all, end-all; even with it off, the OS sometimes calls the offending code that triggers the NVidia drivers to crash (e.g. Mission Control; it just crashed now after weeks of use with no crash).

Hopefully the outsourced Apple stores here in Norway will take this in for a replacement -- thanks to whoever noticed the 3 year extended warranty update on TS4088.

Tor

I think its a probelm with OS X as whenever im using my windows 7 bootcamp partition, this issue never seems to happen. Again if it is, then it is very poor of apple to come out with a fix in 3 **** years.

I hope this helps you. I have almost solved the problem by doing the following.

1. Start in Safe Boot mode and allow the system to remove some files and reset the display resolution. Do not change this setting.

2. Create a new user with Admin rights and use this new user to login from now on.

4. Install the gfxCardstatus program and set it to integrated only.

5. Stop using Chrome. The new version of Firefox is a big improvement and seems to cause fewer problems. You can migrate your settings, bookmarks, etc.

6. If Mac Mail seems to be causing the problem, download Eurora for Mac and use it instead. It is better anyway, in my opinion.

Hope this helps.