Good old-fashioned kernel panic

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
September 29th, 2003 • 11:35 pm

Eeek. I thought that, with the advent of Jaguar (Mac OS X 10.2), the ugly, “Unix text spilling” kernel panics of the early days of Mac OS X were supposed to have been replaced with the slightly more palatable multilingual “Please restart your computer now” messages in an anti-aliased font over a grey background. Apparently not.

For the first time today, I actually experienced the old kind of kernel panic in Jaguar. I was obviously doing something that was taxing the system, i.e. asking Amadeus II to amplify a 600 MB AIFF file by 200% — while continuing to use my computer (a dual 1.25 GHz G4) for other tasks, such as typing text in Word or checking my email.

Still, there was a lot of free disk space on the volume (something like 30 GB), and my G4 should reasonably be expected to be able to handle such disk-intensive activities in the background, shouldn’t it?

Well, it looks like it wasn’t able to do so. I didn’t take a digital picture of the kernel panic screen (maybe I should have), but the error messages seem to indicate something wrong in something with “IOATA” in its name, which sounds like a hard drive-related problem to me (“IO” probably stands for Input/Output and “ATA” is the hard drive interface in the G4).

I don’t think there is much point in my sending a bug report to the maker of Amadeus II. Such kernel panics are, in all likelihood, caused by a flaw in the OS itself.

Oh well.


3 Responses to “Good old-fashioned kernel panic”

  1. Matthew says:

    i get a few on by dual G4, i blame quark ;-)

  2. Pierre Igot says:

    Sorry, can’t help you :). Maybe you should buy a couple of iffy USB devices! Or try what I did (something very disk-intensive). I’ve only had two in the past year, though — so I can’t promise anything :).

  3. Ortwin Zillgen says:

    What am I doing wrong? I do want to see a kernel-panic, at least once. That’s not fair, I always run the latest OS (which is X.2.8 just now), have all the good stuff as new as possible.
    Shall I really switch to MicroSoft products or some other monopolistic DTP-systems to make a kernel-panic happen? Who can help me?

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