Kernel Panicing Mac

Yesterday my Mac began acting weird, the windows on the screen started to do this odd ghosting thing. You’d move the window and the outline of it would stay on the screen and the contents would move around with the mouse. Then the dock started to freak out and wouldn’t do the rolling wave thing. Then Firefox would crash randomly and it wouldnt wake up from its slumber. I gave up and threw in the towel. Something just ISN’T right about this machine.

I called Apple and talked to their AppleCare specialist. His name was Joe and he didnt sound like a Joe. The Indian representative talked me through some trouble shooting and then said “I am unable to diagnose what is wrong, It could be one of three things: Logic Board, Memory or the Hard drive.” uhhh, you think? The next thing we did was try and load up the boot cd. It kernel paniced during that too. Then we tired the AppleCare cd which has TechTool on it. Yeah, still didnt work. He told me “Since I cant pinpoint what is failing, I cant send a tech out to your house. I see you live in Whittier California, you can pack your computer and drive to Brea Califonia and have the people there pack the computer and send it to apple for repair.” I replyed “What? I still have the packaging that Apple used to mail me the computer cant I just put it back in the box and mail this off to you guys? I dont see why the apple store needs to get involved” he replied “Mister Tucker, we only do this for home systems, portables we send you a box and you mail us the computer for repair. This is our only option at this point.”  disgusted I gave in and prepared to backup everything and take the computer to the Apple Store since I too stupid to pack up myself.

I began backing up my data using SuperDuper! in the hope of copying over the file to my portable usb drive I use for my laptop. The backup completed and I attempted to move the disk image to the USB drive. It kept giving me an error that I didnt have rights to copy the data it the drive. WTF! I loaded the drive back to the windows box and changed permissions on the drive and all the folders in it. “Wait… permissions?” I thought, “thats it! the damn Mac cant write to NTFS!” and I was right. My drive was formated for NTFS and the Macs cant write to it. I prolly could have found a way like the Linux guys have in the past. I had 80 gigs of shit to move and no place to put it on my network or drives. Nor did I have 90 gigs of free space to offload my usb drive so I could format it for the Mac.

I packed the baby up and we headed to Fry’s Electronics to look for a FireWire external drive. They dont have a big selection of FireWire drives only USB. I had my choice of 5 different ones ranging from 100 gigs to 750 gigs. I bought a 250gb model and went home to began backing up my stuff in hope of getting the Mac to the Apple store today.

The backup went way smooth with the firewire drive and I boxed up the machine and on our way to see family in South Orange County we stopped at the Apple Store to drop the computer off. Jen and Chris stayed in the car since I was reassured that I could just “Drop and Go” my machine with a tech. Caitlin, Jess and I went into the depths of the mall and went into the Apple Store.  Cailin was mezmerized by the amount of iPods and laptops and took Jess to the kids area to play on some iMacs. I talked to the guy up front and told him I was to have them mail off my computer for repair. He replied “uhhh, hmm, really? lemme get a Genius to talk to you about this”. Andy the Genius came and I told him the story, He was just as puzzled as the first guy, hell just as puzzled as I was when the CSR told me this on the phone. It was 30 mins to closing by now Jess wanted me and not Caitlin so I was at the Genius bar holding her and talking to Andy. He in his many years working and dealing with Apple has never heard anyone taking a computer to the store to be mailed off. He had heard of them mailing the customer a box to ship the computer back in. I explained to him my fustrations and also told him about how if I was a new computer user I would have been 1000 times more pissed than I am now. He totally agreed and offered to fix the computer on site.  He ordered all the replacement parts he could so I’d pretty much end up with a new computer in the end. Logic Board, Hard drive and Memory were all ordered. I was told it would take about 3 days for them to work on it. The CSR told me it would take 2 weeks. Even Andy said that sounded strange ‘Did you call Dell on accident?’ we both joked.

Hopefully my computer will be in working order and I can restore my data without incident. I’ll keep you guys posted.