Q: Lion randomly crashes - black screen

Hi,

I went to the Apple Store and I had the disgrace of having a so-called genius tell me that I should wait for the Mac OS X 10.7.2 Update. I even showed him that I had installed both updates (7.2 and MBP Graphics Update) but he still insisted that I should update to the latest version. He deleted the ByHost folder and told me that should fix the issue, but after a few hours is clear that this hasn't solved anything. I ended up reinstalling Mac OS X Lion and then running the combo updater back to 10.7.2. and the log in black screen issue is still here and now it seems that a hanging shutdown issue that I tought was gone, now has returned to make my misery more agravated.

It is likely that this will be my first and last MacBook Pro, I have no faith in Apple's ability to provide a good computer experience to the user. Lion is Apple's "Windows Vista".

vea1083,

Apple often does get it right after a while.

I recall the frustrations back in 2008 on this problem but they eventually did make it right and the 4.5 and 4.0 year-old-systems that I had with the problem are still up and running.

You might try the approach of calling Technical Support in the hopes of getting a better support person. You can escalate a tier too if the first-level person doesn't do a satisfactory job.

Don't call all they will have you do is clear your caches from ~ and / remove log in items and remove the login items plist and login windows plist from both ~ and / then just reboot trash the plists, repair disk permissions, and if it is not fixed reinstall the os if that doesn't work then you need to do a complete erase and install....thats all those tier 2 folks can do for you two when regarding this issue....one advisor told me it was their biggest call driver lately....

@virus2500: it might be paralells, it's basically the only program that needs kernel extensions. I had paralells 6 but because of the black screen issues I upgraded to 7.0 thinking it might've resolved the issue but it didn't. I need paralells every day for work so I can't afford to uninstall it without more assurance :/ Can you provide more info about your "solution"?

Well, i just noticed that most of the time a parallels kernel extensions was the last loaded one.

The crashes also happened when i didn't have parallels running. I had Parallels Desktop 6 btw. so i didn't do the upgrade!

After uninstalling it completly the laptop worked fine for 24 hours. I then installed Parallels again and it would start crashing frequently again. After uninstalling it again my laptop is pretty stable.

I did have the Black screen issue once or twice a week. But with Parallels it was crashing 4 - 5 times a day!

Since i don't need it on a regular basis i though i'll just wait till apple published the update but it seems it didn't solve the parallels issue :-/

is there a forum topic for the paralells issue, or an online bug report? I'll be able to uninstall paralels on wednesday so I'll see what happens then. anyone else solved the issues by uninstalling paralells?

I would love to call the Apple Tech Support Staff via the telephone, the problem is that my 1 year AppleCare expired and they will request me to buy a $50 tech support incident fee. I am in contact with the Apple Developer department and see if somehow I can avocate for either a firmware or hardware fix. the thing that is bugging me right now is the hanging shutdown issue with Lion, I suspect it has to do with a bug in the dock process and is annoying as ****. What is a portable computer that you can't shutdown????

Apple needs to fix Lion!

Michael Moy2 wrote:

 

You might try the approach of calling Technical Support in the hopes of getting a better support person. You can escalate a tier too if the first-level person doesn't do a satisfactory job.

Hi,

I uninstalled Parallels 7 and I'll review system stability.

However, I share eith you a record in the log of the Console of the last freeze in my system (about 10 minutes ago). It happened while browsing in Safari. The log shows an attempt to record OpenGL operation in the Cache from Safari which was repeatedly denied. The last statement recorded before the freeze is the NVDA (OpenGL): Channel exception!

I do not want to fill this post with code, so I've shared it in the following link: http://cl.ly/BNqs

Greetings.

> I would love to call the Apple Tech Support Staff via the telephone, the problem is that my 1 year AppleCare

> expired and they will request me to buy a $50 tech support incident fee.

In 2008, I went to the Apple Store to get a board swapped and the Apple Store was going to charge me for the board swap because I was out of warranty. I called AppleCare to discuss the case and they agreed to pick up the tab for the board swap. They did not charge me a $50 tech support incident fee - they just referenced the support case number from the Apple Store.

Picked up our son's system from the Apple Store this evening. It was clear that it had a new motherboard and he ran about twenty minutes of tests (I was having repairs done on another machine) and he had no problems with the system. He did run some games, the Photobooth reproducer and some other things - everything ran clean. So it seems pretty clear to me that a new motherboard fixes the black screen problems.

I've been following this thread, since I also owned a MBP 15" i7 built April 2010 and had BSOD a few times since Lion 10.7.2. (updated with the latest graphic fix) though very seldom happened. Just installed gfxCardStatus yesterday cause I noticed that my MBP has been consistently running the nVidia card (even on battery). Found out that the WD Quickview (logon item) had been forcing the nVidia to be used all the time. I ve uninstalled it now, and the MBP has been correctly switching between the two graphics.

What is interesting is that I had the WD Quickview running ever since SL and also after upgrading to Lion. Hence my BSOD must have not been caused by the graphic switching, since my MBP has been running the nVidia card all this while.

Just thought I would share my situation, since we don't have any apple store where I lived and I'm out of warranty too. Luckily the BSOD seldom happened (yet).

To the 15" pro users, have you been able to install the latest fix update? This seems to have taken care of the issue and also the video glitches. So far, no black screen, even after messing with photobooth and saving files with google chrome.... SO FAR!

15" mid 2010 and yes I've installed the firmware update and no, that did not fix the problem!

The photobooth trick is no longer causing BSOD, but I just connected my external monitor and had Safari running in full screen when I was hit by yet another BSOD.

I had downgraded to Snowy and yesterday I did a clean install of Lion. Then I upgraded to 10.7.2 and installed the firmware update. But still no luck.

Guess the Apple engineers will have to get back to work.

The problem only increased in frequency after installing the "fix." In fact, while before the screen would black out at random intermittent times (say maybe 1ce a week), after the "fix," it occurred three times within the span of 15 minutes of crashes, forced shutdowns, and reboots.  Hope you fare better.

Jasper 90s wrote:

 

To the 15" pro users, have you been able to install the latest fix update? This seems to have taken care of the issue and also the video glitches. So far, no black screen, even after messing with photobooth and saving files with google chrome.... SO FAR!

Almost 2 days since i installed the fix, so far so good (15" pro user)

Related to Parallels Desktop (in my case v7).

I tried uninstalling it, but the problem still happens.

Greetings.