Q: Lion randomly crashes - black screen

Has anyone tried installing Lion in a clean partition and migrating from your Snow Leopard disk, instead of updating an existing Snow Leopard system?

I didn't have any problems when I tested updating a clean install of SL to Lion, but didn't use it for very long (might've hit problems if I had waited long enough). But I've now installed Lion by itself on a new partition and am migrating my SL partition to it (leaving out smcFanControl, which seemed to solve my crash problem, but my SL updated to Lion still ran VMWare Fusion hotter than under SL). I'll report back here, but I don't recall if anyone had tried this (someone recommended it, though).

I too have a mid-2010 MacBook Pro, and was intending to upgrade to Lion.  For the first six months in which I owned the machine, I had what sounds like very similar symptoms (this was on Snow Leopard), which were cured (after a fair amount of yelling at Apple on my part -- initially they didn't want to do anything) by a logic board replacement.

Now, needless to say, I am afraid to upgrade to Lion, lest some version of the problem start all over again.  So I won't, until I hear that the issue has been diagnosed and fixed.

xgrep wrote:

 

Has anyone tried installing Lion in a clean partition and migrating from your Snow Leopard disk, instead of updating an existing Snow Leopard system?

I've been running Lion like this for a little while now (an hour or so) with no crashes. That may not continue, but it's far longer than it ever ran before without crashing. Spotlight is still indexing the new partition, so the CPU is pretty busy and the temp and fan speed are up. I'll let that finish and see how performance compares. So far, my impressions are mixed: some stuff is clearly faster (and I'm not talking about stuff where they can control the speed, like how fast genie-shrink works), but other stuff seems slower (Windows Vista is running slower, but that may be partly due to Spotlight).

Hello,

I have the same issues being discussed here. I find that gfxCardStatus has made things pretty stable. I have yet to try the developer drivers.

One question: has anyone noted increased stability on battery power? I was stable all weekend, plugged in. Also at work today, but soon after I unplugged it, still on integrated, the computer totally froze and I had to do a hard reboot. When it rebooted, it reloaded and then crashed again, this time with the kernel panic that has been described previously.

If I have to keep it plugged in, that's okay, but then my laptop is quickly turning into a desktop.

gilson.cavalcanti wrote:

 

  So i was forced to clean install the OSX. The curious part is that i tried to clean install the Snow Leopard using my retail CD and.... nothing! the boot from the CD does not work. Apparently, the Lion seized my system forever. The only way was to burn a Install CD of the damned Lion and clean install the Lion OS X.

Yep, ran into this same problem after my initial Lion update. All my bootable install media that was pre-Lion would fail to boot! I was still able to boot from a USB drive that had Snow Leopard installed on it, and from the Lion install flash drive, but that was it. I managed to work around this by booting from the Lion installer, then using the "Restore from Time Machine" option to restore my Snow Leopard backup (first thing I did on install of Lion was turn off Time Machine backups, for this very reason). Mind you, this was complicated by the fact that the Lion installer wasn't actually able to see the 3rd party NAS containing my backup. Had to copy it across to a normal USB drive first.

This is actually one of the strongest reasons that I think there were firmware upgrades involved in the Lion install process, and that this is one of the causes of the primary bug discussed on this thread.

xgrep wrote:

 

Has anyone tried installing Lion in a clean partition and migrating from your Snow Leopard disk, instead of updating an existing Snow Leopard system?

 

My second Lion attempt was to a second clean partition, not even migrating data, and still hitting the crash. So it's definitely not user data related.

gfxCardStatus MacBooks only or will it work on an iMac as well? I know the site says MBP but i was just curious if it would be worth trying on desktops too.

I have this problem with my Mac Pro as well.  One thing I noticed is that it does it everytime I connect my iphone or ipad to sync.  As soon as iturns recognizes them, black screen.  LION IS APPLE'S VISTA!!!  This is my first apple, and I'm really disappointed and angry that I have to deal with this.  This is the kind of stuff that I did not think I would have to worry about when I switched to apple.

Endareth wrote:

 

My second Lion attempt was to a second clean partition, not even migrating data, and still hitting the crash. So it's definitely not user data related.

OK, thanks, that's another good data point. Too bad, though, it sounded promising (as do so many other little victories).

FWIW, I've been running without incident for about 5 hours, now. Mind you, I've got an older MBP with the 9400M GPU, not the newer ones that many of you have. And I must say, I like Lion.

Endareth wrote:

 

gilson.cavalcanti wrote:

 

  So i was forced to clean install the OSX. The curious part is that i tried to clean install the Snow Leopard using my retail CD and.... nothing! the boot from the CD does not work. Apparently, the Lion seized my system forever. The only way was to burn a Install CD of the damned Lion and clean install the Lion OS X.

Yep, ran into this same problem after my initial Lion update. All my bootable install media that was pre-Lion would fail to boot! I was still able to boot from a USB drive that had Snow Leopard installed on it, and from the Lion install flash drive, but that was it. I managed to work around this by booting from the Lion installer, then using the "Restore from Time Machine" option to restore my Snow Leopard backup (first thing I did on install of Lion was turn off Time Machine backups, for this very reason). Mind you, this was complicated by the fact that the Lion installer wasn't actually able to see the 3rd party NAS containing my backup. Had to copy it across to a normal USB drive first.

 

This is actually one of the strongest reasons that I think there were firmware upgrades involved in the Lion install process, and that this is one of the causes of the primary bug discussed on this thread.

Lion apparently does some new stuff with the partition map. You can see the recovery partitions when you boot with Option, but not in Startup Disk. It left a Lion recovery partition on my disk in spite of the fact that I deleted all Lion system partitions and restored Snow Leopard with Time Machine (although that only affects a single partition, of course, not the entire disk image). It's actually a good thing that it did leave the recovery partition, because I was unable to delete a Lion partition with Snow Leopard's Disk Utility! But I really do like the new recovery partition (one on every physical device that Lion's been installed on, it seems). It's so much faster and easier than wondering where I misplaced my installation DVD (or which kid last grabbed the family pack DVD).

I really hate to engage in speculation, when there are people who actually know what's going on (though they aren't talking, yet), but this behavior could be purely partition map logic, not firmware (although firmware does handle booting, deciding which partitions to show as bootable). This is big stuff, though, for an OS update.

Another data point: Since I rolled back to Snow Leopard (restoring a pre-Lion clone via Super Duper) three days ago, I've had zero crashes, compared to several a day during Lion. Which suggests there's no firmware involved.

Also, all of my Lion crashes came despite using gfxCardStatus to stick to the integrated video. (This is on a mid-2010 2.66 GHz Core i7 MacBook Pro, like many others' problems.)

This is my first apple computer and I was so excited for my MacBook pro. After being plague with black screen and DVD issues, among others, I am returning this one and purchasing another one. I am shocked so many people have the same problems and apple is not addressing the issues. I am reluctant to even buy new one, in fear that the problems will be worst on the second one. Maybe I was not meant to be Mac person and should go back to pc.

Did anyone else get a MacBook pro with lion experience problems?

Ok so yesterday an Apple support supervisor asked me to install a fresh install of Lion on an external HDD. This was to check if I kernel panic without anything else installed... Well from an absolutely fresh install (not upgrade from SL or anything) I've now crashed consistantly by going into Photo Booth > Effects > click page 2 > Kernel panic. I have also kernel paniced randomly by only having mail and safari open, not doing anything amazing.

Pretty frustrating that Lion/MBP's can be this broken. How could Apple not have found something this obvious in testing?? I've now called the supervisor back and left details on the issue... waiting for a callback and what to do next...

That's one of the most annoying things—this exact bug existed and was reported in the developer previews of Lion, so it was effectively a known bug at launch time!

@wired00  - I installed a fresh copy of Lion on an external usb HDD last night and had a similar result.  The new installation crashed within 5 minutes.  I started streaming a news video and then opened the Chess game reasoning that this might cause a switch to the NVIDIA card.  It looks like it did, because my mb pro black screened.  When I checked the logs, I saw a kernel panic with a backtrace containing the nvidia entries.

Note that there was no third-party software installed on the test Lion installation.