OS Lion keeps randomly crashing. Anyone else?

Same thing happen with mine (Macbook Pro Mid 2010, 2.4GHz, 4G RAM. Please HELP!!!

This exact same thing keeps happening on my Macbook Pro. Purchased in May 2010 so AppleCare JUST expired. Crashes randomly, screen goes completly black, must hold down power to restart. This was happening occasionally using Snow Leopard, I installed Lion and it stated happening more frequently (probably 20+ times at this point in 3 days). I just spent my day reformatting the HDD and reinstalling a fresh copy of Leopard then Lion on top of that. The system seemed fine until browsing with Safari for about 5 minutes then the same issue just occured. There has to be something we can do about this.

System Details:

2.66 GHz Core i7

4GB 1067 DDR3 Ram

i rebuilt the permissions under disk utility but it still crashes since..

Mine keeps doing the same thing and I have the brand new 27 inch iMac 3.1Ghz model. its really frustrating!

Hi,

Similar issue ... My setup is relatively simple and worked great with Snow Leopard:

• Circa 2010 iMac 27”Quad I7, 1TB Harddrive, 12Gb RAM (4Gb factory installed + 8Gb Corsair selfinstalled)
• Connected Peripherals include, Magic Mouse (via BT), Apple Wireless Keyboard (via BT), Wacom Bamboo Table (via USB) and a DroboPro (via iSCSI).
• Network connectivityis over Wi-Fi
• OS-X software is up-to-date.
• All self installedsoftware/drivers are upgraded to their latest versions and, to the best of my knowledge, are Lion compatible.

Lightroom, PhotoShop, iPhoto, appear to be working as designed, BUT Finder, Safari, Firefox, Preview, DVD Player, Parallels, have frozen my iMac on seemingly random and non-repeatable scenarios. The freezes appear to occur in both admin and non-adminuser accounts. To recover from the freezes, when I could, I have SSH’d via Remoter and shutdown –h|-r now’d the machine. I have had the shutdown also freeze to a white screen and the wheel showing up. My last resort was to hard boot by killing the power.

Here are a few of thetraditional approaches I have tried:

• Update all software to latest versions
• Permission repair via DiskUtility
• Clean install of OS-X by formatting OS-X partition through recovery mode and reinstalling Lion followed by a Timemachine restore via Migration assistant.
• Watching system.log, kernel.log, windowsserver.log and the Console for ‘All Messages’ for obvious issues
• Systematically cleared errors that seem to be beefing up the logs, such as Intego, where a clean uninstall, did not remove processes from /Library/StartupItems as well asitems in the LaunchDeamon folders.
• Deleted cache/tmp files that indicated to have permission issues, specifically around Safari, where WebProcess was warning of write deny to Cookie Caches. Deleteing the caches have not cleared up the issue. I suspect it will be resolved in Safari 5.1.1 (whenever it comes out).
• Reading crashlogs has proven that I have reached my limits in debugging the issue.

Anyhow, I am curious of any other solutions that may help resolve my issue.

Thanks in advance.

Mail is crashing everytime I open it after upgrading to Lion. Very, Very frustrating! Any ideas?

One additional step that I did was to clean up rebuild my Keychain. Here is how:

• Through your FInder, open the 'Utility' folder within the 'Applications' folder
• Open the 'Keychain Access' application within the 'Utility' folder
• For each of the Keychains in the left panel, click on 'Keychain First Aid'
• You may have to enter you login password
• Select the 'Repair' radio button and click 'Start'

As of this morning, my open issue still remains to be the intermittent connectivlity my DroboPro external drive.

Good luck ...

I had the same problem on my Mac mini after I "upgraded" it to Lion, whereas it worked flawlessly in Snow Leopard. I have it connected to my A/V amp via its HDMI port, and the problem would occur whenever I switched away from its input to another device. It appears that if the screen saver came on with no monitor connected it would simply lock up with no video output and I would have to reset the SMC every time before it would restart.

I wouldn't expect that to be the problem with an iMac or an MBP, but if it's happening after your Mac has been idle for a while, I'd suggest maybe turning off the screen saver and any hot corners you have set for it, and all of the Energy Saving options at least temporarily and see if that makes a difference.

Anyone having kernel panics should get a report from it. Post the contents here and we can tell you what incompatible 3rd party software is causing it.

I have an iMac and am having the same issues. I've had the iMac for two years and never had to manually turn it off because it froze until I installed Lion. I've had Lion less than a week and had to completely shut down eight times. There does not seem to be a pattern to the program that I am using when it happens. It's happened with Safari, Firefox, Word, and PowerPoint.

My computer is also painfully slow switching between apps and programs, where this wasn't an issue before Lion.

I had kernal panics (at least 5), slow processing speed, frozen apps, beach balls of death galore, and several other problems... So here is what I did (and it worked!)...

I backed up all essential files to an external harddrive (with the wonderful and easy to use CCC). Here is a suggested list (although everyone's needs and methods are different):

Desktop (and some recommend to not have actual files on your Desktop, but rather aliases), Photos folder, iPhoto folder, Movies folder, iTunes Music folder, Documents folder, the LIBRARY folder for the System, and the LIBRARY folder for the main User (you can reveal the User Library folder in Lion by going to the GO menu up top and holding "Option" on your keyboard), and finally my Mail folder (which is actually in the User Library anyways, but I did it twice just in case). You could also do your Applications folder as well (I just reinstalled all of my key apps though, cause I have all of my passcodes handy).

Then I booted up the computer holding down COMMAND + R and selected the new "Restore" volume that OS X Lion can mount.

I then used disk utility to completely wipe my hard drive clean.

After that I reinstalled Lion (there is actually an option to do so right in the Restore menu (the first menu back when you booted up with Command + R)).

If you have a boot disc it is better (you can search online on how to make one with the "Reveal Package Contents" method), becuase otherwise it will download another copy of Lion from the Internet, which might take a while. I used a bootable DVD that I made, and it only took me 30 minutes to install Lion from start to finish (with the newly cleaned drive).

Then, once up and running, I just restored all of my key files and folders to their respective places (not every single file and folder, as I didn't want to transfer anything that wasn't essential and MINE, i.e., not from the system) and then reinstalled all of my apps (yes, annoying, but I wanted to really start fresh).

Anyways... Lion is SCREAMING (or shall we say "Roaring"? 🙂) now, and it was sluggish and almost dead before I did this.

Hope that works for you (although it definitely will be a long process if you have to backup like 300+ GB of files and folders like I did).

Good luck everyone!

More on using the Recovery mode that I spoke about above:

http://web.me.com/pondini/AppleTips/RecoveryHD.html

And on making a recovery disc:

http://web.me.com/pondini/AppleTips/LionInstallDisc.html

same deal here ...

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3202156?answerId=15757995022#15757995022

This worked for me. Go to preferences and then energy saver. In the upper left corner is an option "Automatic Graphics Switching" Un check it. This was suggested by another member. It worked for me. I was getting total freezes opst Lion on my 17" MacBook Pro (Mid 2011) although my MacPro worked fine with no crashes.