Lion randomly crashes - black screen

i installed the tool

By the way, I chaged my mac's graphic switcher in Preferences>Energy Saver to "Not automatic". It seems to be working well. Battery lasts less tough.

I'm having the same problems, I can't even remember how many crashes I've had today, but I've sent all reports in to Apple.

One thing I'm wondering is what kind of harddrives people have? Cause my iStat is reporting that my hdd temp is 128 degrees celsius, even though the area where the drive is, is completely cold. =( edit: looks like thats a bug in iStat in general, guess its not that...

Gah, I really like Lion, apart from this - but I guess I will have to roll back to SL =(

There's probably more than one reason for this black screen crash, but for me the following has worked.

I'm getting the black screen when I return to my iMac and waking it from sleep. The Main screen remains black, but a second monitor I have attached lights up. I then press the control-eject keys to bring up the "Are you sure you want to shut down your computer now?" panel. I can't see the main screen of course, but I then hit the 's' key for the 'Sleep' button. My mac goes to sleep a few seconds later. When I wake it up a second time, the main screen returns to life. I'm then good to go (until the next time I leave my mac long enough for it to go to sleep - then I just repeat the above)

One of the features of Lion that I've been looking forward to, is that the screen doesn't turn on when the mac is awoken by network activity (e.g. logging in from another mac of device to fileshare or iTunes share). It's a great idea, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it just might be related the bug that's been plaguing my Mac.

Good luck to everyone else having problems.

It's not Google Chrome, because I don't have it installed (never did) and I get 4-6 crashes a day.

This is happening to me also, about once everyday.

know it's not adding much to the discussion. But I figure the sooner Apple knows the scope of the problem the sooner it will get fixed.

Happens to me a lot too. MBP I5 2010.

Everytime I try and add a new tab in Safari when it is in full-screen. Poof! Black-screen, backlit keyboard, and me hitting the restart button.

I've been able to reproduce this crash multiple times and consistently on my 2010 15" MBP i7.

Open up PhotBooth in full screen and go to the effects. Try to go to the 2nd page of effects and BAM crash. I was able to get it to do this 3 times in a row.

Anyone else able to reproduce this?

@ Ben Decker

I tried reproducing the crash in the way you mentioned and couldn't do it. I tried with gfxCardStatus set to dynamic, and tried with it disabled completely. I could open photobooth in full screen and flick through all effects pages with no problem.

I guess there are just different things which cause the kernel panic on each machine however, it always comes back to the nvidia modules appearing in the crash log. As i mentioned in a previous post, i could reliably produce a crash by using google chrome and simply saving a file but even THAT is not causing a Kernel panic for me anymore. So its really quite random.

Regarding the crashing though, i've now not crashed for a whole 24hours by leaving mine on gfxCardStatus = integrated. I don't know if this helps apple by leaving it like this though. I also know that when i return to work on monday i will not be able to use my 24" external monitor because discrete (nvidia card) is required to use an external monitor...

I upgraded my iMac 3.06 core 2 duo with 4g ram to Lion the other day. Now, about 2-3 times every 10 minutes or so the screen goes completely black until I move the mouse. I am doing things when this happens, it is almost like sleeping, but none of those features are turned on, and it should never go to a black screen without going to the screensaver 1st anyway - anyone have any ideas?

I upgraded to Lion a couple of days ago. I've got a 15in MBP Mid 2010, with a NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M 256 MB.

Right after I upgraded I also started experiencing the black screen crash (had to reboot each time after). My MBP would crash after opening Quick Look on a PDF... not 100% reproducible but every time it crashed it was because of that.

After using gfxcardstatus and forcing "Integrated Only" I stopped getting the crashes. I've noticed something really strange since then.

In iStat Menus, when the card is set (in gfxcardstatus) to "Integrated Only", the "GPU Die - Analog" temperature shoots up to around 125 degrees celsius. This is completely impossible. There is a bug somewhere that is giving the wrong temperature. When I set gfxcardstatus to "Discrete Only", that same temperature drops to a normal range of 50-60 degrees.

My theory:

• There is a bug in the nvidia driver or temperature sensor drivers, or in the GPU switching code
• When the computer is in dynamic GPU switching mode it probably starts off in Integrated mode
• When some more demanding GPU processing is required, the computer quickly switches to the Discrete GPU
• At that moment, something reads the temperature of the GPU and it's at 130 degrees!!!
• Immediately the computer shuts down the GPU in failsafe mode causing a black screen

Solution? Keep the computer on Discrete or Integrated graphics for now until Apple fixes it.

NOTE 1: This could also be a bug just in iStat menus… funny thing since 60C = 140F, might be a simple converion bug somewhere. can someone find out how to read the temperature another way to be sure?

NOTE 2: This is just a theory… anyone with this problem should test it and tell me what happens!

Download gfxCardStatus: http://codykrieger.com/gfxCardStatus

Download iStat Menus (keep an eye on temps): http://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/

The first time this happened to me was also when using Quick Look actually, though not a PDF, but a PNG-image. Though afterwards I've used it plenty of times without any sorts of crashing.

I've also had several crashes coming from doing gestures, like switching spaces.

@Davecap, that all sounds interesting but when i tried reproducing that same issue. What i see is that in discrete mode GPU Die Analog = ~ 49C and when on Integrated GPU Die Analog = ~ 31C. I don't see it jumping to ~125C at any point especially not in integrated.

Anyone else seeing what Davecap mentions?

I just realized that turning off the 'automatic switching' option in the preferences does not resolve the issue ... just had the first crash.

I also had two crashes in a row right after I used the 4 fingers down gesture that reveal all windows of a program and shows the recent files in a cover flow style view.

It really makes no fun at all to work with this OS when you have to worry that everything you do might cause a crash ...

Same thing here.. After readying everyones posts Im getting the impression the mid 2010 macbook pros are the worst effected. This is driving me insane - constant crashing, making my mac basically unusable. I prey that apple release a fix for this bug soon.

mid 2010 macbook pro i7 user.