Lion randomly crashes - black screen

This is a really weird issue.

I've got a 15" 2010 Macbook Pro (SSD) + Nvidia 330 GPU, 8GB RAM

It seemed like any time i got into anything that might use the GPU heavily - ususally in combination with swiping on the trackpad, the computer would crash into a black screen and the keyboard will light up. (like everyone else on this thread)

Then I noticed that when i docked it to my 27" Cinema HD display - on the nvidia GPU of course - I went through an entire day without a single crash -- in fact it's never crashed when plugged into the HD display and I've purposely done a lot of spaces, launchpad, chrome, full screening - all the things that seems to trigger the crashes.. and not a single crash.

I'm wondering if it has something to do with the act of swapping between the integrated GPU and the nvidia one? ..or maybe it's related to the built in track pad? (when i dock my laptop and use it with the hd display, I use bluetooth magic trackpad, not the one on the macbook.)

I'm using the gfxcardstatus app - and i think it helps, though I'm pretty sure it's crashed once or twice with it too.

Just for the record the computer has never crashed with snow leopard, and it's crashed at least 20 times -- just like this -- since Lion. Thankfully the recovery process its fairly painless, and i usually don't loose too much.

Hear Hear wierd00 !

Exactly same story on my end, my coligue bought same model and he has not have a single issue on SL yet. While all long, going back six months, I have had random crash on SL that was getting more frequent with every update. Finally when Lion came along issue was magnified.

Apple repair center had it for 3 days and cleared all hardest as being faulty, according to their tests! All that gives the theory of lower grade hardware in some mid 2010 MBP very plausible platform!

As we stand right now, I'm back on SL and integrated as the only stable solution, so there you have it.........that is my story and as I gathered few other posters here and so far sounds plausible and explains randomness of this issue........

wierd00

"One final thing to think about: Another reason i'm certain its a hardware + firmware issue and not simply a driver problem... I bought my MBP mid 2010 at the exact same time as my work mate. We both have the same model. He never crashed in SL, not once. I started crashing many times after about 6months. Then we both updated to Lion on the same day. I started crashing immediately and upto 15+ times a day. He is STILL yet to crash. Please tell me how software could result in my identical machine crashing when his does not if its purely a driver issue and not hardware? We both have identical software how could it magically perform differently on his machine than mine?"

A couple of points:

- I do think it is good for people to share their experiences here. The attention will get Apple to focus on this.

- I had an unusable system despite all the reinstalations until I did the smc=max/gfx=i thing. I had a stable system for a while now except when I switched to the nvidia for a while (that crashed it after the first sleep)

- My system does not prompt me at all for submitting bug reports, which is weird. Not sure if there is a way to force it to do so?

- Today I had to use the nvidia again for a bit for a presentation. It didn't crash but the unused space of the screen (background) was displaying blocks of views of other windows from other desktops... it was a collage/overlay of things that while not embarassing I didn't want my audience to see. Also temp rose to ~80C while the fan speed was at max. With the internal it hovers about 50C

- In the 14 months before Lion I had zero crashes and my uptime was from weeks to months (basically only when Apple software upgrade forced me) despite development, image processing, running parallels, and often running out of memory on a 8Gb machine. I won't reach any conclusions as I have developed and know how things can go terribly wrong with "minor" bugs under the perfect combinations.

- Also, while the suggestion to go back to SL is great for some, that is not a solution and there may be reasons why we can't/won't.

- 17in MBP, mid 2010, 8Gb RAM, 500Gb HD

elio.dainese wrote:

Anyway a guy reported few pages back in this discussion that a downgrade to Snow Leopard fixed the issue.

Yep, still no issues: Google Analytics, XCode + iOS Simulator, Flash Professional, Processing.. everything's fine.

I had a problem directly after the SL installation though. It just showed me a bright blue screen when I started. But I got rid of it by deleting some preference file in single user mode. Hit me up if you experience any problems..

SOLVED FOR MBP 2.66 i7 mid 2010 - NVidia CUDA update 4.0.21

Download the disk image from nVidia at http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/4_0/drivers/devdriver_4.0.21_m acos.dmg

After installing and rebooting, my Macbook Pro is serviceable in Lion. No crashes for more than an hour in Discrete Only mode (I use an external monitor). Fan Control is not installed. gfxCardStatus 2.1 is installed.

I am much happier now. I'll report back if the problems resurface.

Good to hear you have an hour crash-free Martinfromeugene...but I think I'd wait until you have several days of uptime with no crash before you mark this as "solved." I initially had about ten hours of uptime before the mad crashing began post-Lion upgrade.

With the gfxCardStatus set to Integrated for about four days now, I've only had one crash and it was not the dreaded black screen, but a normal kernel panic from which the MBP elegantly recovered (including the most current version of a doc I was working on).

Yeah i might wait over the weekend and see how you (or others) go martinfromeugene. Someone a few posts back mentioned they tried that CUDA + dev driver and still crashed. I'm a little worried of any issues with uninstalling all the cuda + dev drivers kexts if it doesn't solve the problem.

Whats worrying though, if it *doesn't* fix the problem then we're gunna be pretty SOL imo. If Nvidia hasn't solved the problem with their latest dev driver then its a worry that our crashing won't be fixed anytime soon...

Also i looked all over the nvidia forums and couldn't see any reference to OSX black screen crashes

I probably ought to wait "several days", but since I couldn't run my MPB for more than 15 minutes - and usually less than 5 - I'm still content.

Maybe others will have success with the nVidia software install. Worth a try if nothing else is working (and for me nothing else worked).

Lots of intestive work, and still no video problems. Fans aren't on high when they don't need to be, no crashes of any sort. Still have issues with Lion (Mail's activity window is visible in any application, but only clickable in Mail) but now that I can use this new-fangled OS, I'll await an update from Apple to 'fix' the smaller, niggling problems.

It feels like a solution for now. As I said, I will report back if I encounter problems with this fix. But so far all is stable and I can work with Lion. Before I doubt I could have written this post before the Mac crashed.

The nVidia dmg file is all I needed. Don't know from CUDA + dev driver, but if that's what the nVidia software installed on my MBP, I'm for it - since my MBP now works.

Yeah for sure if your only able to stay up for 15 mins or so then anything is worth a shot asap! Keen to see how you go

I installed the nvidia 4.0.21 driver and am still experiencing frequent crashes. Running simple keynote presnentations in dynamic or discrete mode is enough to trigger the crash - usually in less than 2 minutes of use.

This morning I ran the apple hardware test on my machine (mid-2010 mb pro i7 2.66 8gb). No errors were reported; the test ran for ~51 minutes and my underside of my machine must have been 70-80C. The fans sounded like they were running flat-out...

As I mentioned in my previous posts - my machine was very solid under 10.6.x

Just curious... has anyone on here got this problem with the mid 2010 i5 processor macbook pro? I have the i7 and seems the previous few pages are mainly people with that CPU also. I wonder if its more prevelant with the i7 + 330m... not that it helps in anyway...

Edit: ignore that just saw someone on page 3 with i5, whats interesting though is out of probably 20 posts stating their processor in first 4 pages, only 1 was i5.

OK, I removed smcFanControl and reset the SMC and pRAM. So far, Lion has been running without a single crash (this is less than an hour, but the first time, it crashed within 5 minutes). But it's definitely running a bit warmer than it did on Snow Leopard (judging by fan speen and CPU temp as shown in iStat), so I'm going to roll back to Snow and wait for an update that makes everything happy. My MBP is a 2008 with a 9400M nvidia GPU, just so you know that that model crashes too (or did until I removed smcFanControl).

@ xgrep,

I think what you are experiencing is a *different* recognised issue by Apple and should be repairable even out of warranty / apple care. please check this page : http://support.apple.com/kb/ts2377 I suggest you take your machine to apple because it should be covered for free motherboard/GPU replacement. In that page though, it mentions 8400GT not 8600GT but i was sure the 2008 models are recognised as having a fault

The problem we in this thread are mostly experiencing is with the later model nvidia cards especially april 2010 macbook pros

Just experienced the black screen crash on my late 2007 iMac. Machine on, not asleep, no response, had to power down. My model has ATI graphics. I wasn't doing anything on the machine and was away from it for a while. It wasn't overly hot before I powered it down. I did a clean install of Lion from a USB key.

Hi Joshua, did you check the Kernel panic message? the kernel panic's we are experiencing is directly relating to the nvidia GPU. it will be something like this:

...

Kernel Extensions in backtrace:

com.apple.NVDAResman(7.0.2)[7E65ECA2-D3A1-35F8-B845-C975FB531E7E]@0xffffff7f808 b2000->0xffffff7f80b88fff

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]@0xffffff7 f80b89000->0xffffff7f80eaafff

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]@0xffffff7f817390 00->0xffffff7f817f5fff

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

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

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

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

...

You had a kernel panic (resulting in the black screen) but its possibly from another source?

If you didn't get the kernel panic "report to apple" popup after rebooting then you can access your kernel panic logs here: /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/

Hope that helps