Sigh
My Mac is at the Apple store after making an upgrade to 10.5.5. I awoke the other morning to find my computer stuck in a ‘blue screen of death’ (yea, it was actually a blue screen) that came on after the original grey Apple and spinning wheel. It was quite annoying to say the least.
I started to do a debug (as I’ve done a few times before) but then I realized ‘hey, this machine is still under warranty.’ I was also worried their might be some hardware issues so I decided to take it up to the Apple store and get them to work on it. I removed the extra storage hard drives (for security reasons) and dropped it off with the genius bar.
After about 48 hours, they came back with the answer I suspected (i.e. their default answer)–there is a problem with the 3rd party RAM. This is the usual answer they give for most hardware problems (whether or not it is totally to blame is another matter). They took it out, reinstalled 10.5.5 and did the updates/data migration and pronounced it good to go. And as fate usually has it, I brought it home, put my drives back in, turned it on, and boom–kernel panic. Reboot, and the blue screen.
I then threw in a new drive, did an install (clean, on a clean drive) got it up and running with 10.5, but when upgraded and migrated, again, the blue screen of death. I took the drive out of the slot and moved it to another–BSOD. I put all the drives in–BSOD, and all the drives out–BSOD. Clean reinstall-BSOD.
So I said screw it–back to the store. It’s there now (what Apple calls a ‘looper’ in that it looped back in after a previous ticket) and I’m waiting to hear from them.
After doing some research, it seems that 10.5.5 is causing a number of problems with other users. Apple’s support documents are rather sparse (they love to blame one thing, not always every thing that causes a problem). The discussions are showing quite a few bugs with 10.5.5 and I’m digging through trying to find if there is a solution in the complaints on the forums (USB seems to be a big suspect).
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