Flutterby™! : Blue screen of Death on a Mac 2005-11-02 22:45:02.407341+00

Blue screen of Death on a Mac

2005-11-02 22:45:02.407341+00 by Dan Lyke 2 comments

What to do when Your Mac won't start up in Mac OS X. Put here for posterity 'cause it seems like I need this every few weeks, and the past few times I've reinstalled my OS, which takes much longer than these steps.

Particular symptom: Logo appears, screen goes blue with mouse cursor and never (40+ minutes) gets to the login screen. Happens after I hose something hard enough that I have to power cycle it (ie: leave a network drive mounted and switch networks).

Stage 2 of those instructions worked.

I've quit using network drives in general, preferring a local folder mirrored to the network with rsync.

I've removed some particularly troublesome software, most of which was for USB devices that never quite worked right, anyhow. Identifying the bad software can be a problem, but "Console" is your friend.

And the biggest single thing I did in cutting down the crashes was to quit using CodeWarrior and move all my projects to XCode (except for the ones where I'm using CW to cross-compile windows code on my mac, which seems less troublesome).

Don't know if any of these apply to you, but even if the pro-active approach didn't help immediately, it made me feel better because I was trying to solve the problem, rather than just clean up the mess after the fact.

CodeWarrrior to XCode migration is in progress, there are some wackinesses about parts of the XCode environment that I have yet to resolve, but, yeah, that'd be a good start.