Really strange behavior on Jaguar.....

[cdub1988]

......this machine is doing something really weird.

In particular, I came into work this morning and on the screen was a greyed out background with a message (that looks like the typical OS X white semi-opaque background) that says "You need to restart your computer. Press and hold the power button and restart the machine."

Then, it's got the same message in several languages.

At the bottom it looks like it's outputting the MAC address of this machine.

Have NO IDEA where this one came from.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

Chris

[pendragon]

Chris, Almost certainly, what you had was a Kernel Panic. The name sounds worse than it often is. Usually, but not always, this is an indication of a hardware or RAM issue.

Restarting, repairing permissions and running disk repair may fix the issue. Give that a try first. Then let’s see what happens. With luck, the problem will go away.

See Apple Knowledge Base Document 106227 http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106227

Harv

[cdub1988]

Harv -

That was exactly what the machine was doing.

I've had kernel panics on Linux, but didn't realize this was the Jag manifestation of it. Never did understand them much other than to assume the OS puked, so I guess that was "kinda" right.

Thanks!

Chris

[cdub1988]

Harv -

Thanks for the tip.

That didn't fix it.

Wish I could say I have time to fix this, but I'm going to reinstall Linux.

Don't have time to mess with this.

Thanks anyway. I really appreciate the try.

Take care.

Chris