[arnoct]

Yesterday I had a kernel panic coming back from sleep. When I restarted, it spent a few minutes at the normal blue screen you get when booting, then showed my desktop background for about 5 seconds, then it went back to the blue screen. I'm still able to boot into safe mode; I did a repair permissions and although it caught a few things it still persists. I don't have any apps installed that affect the system as a whole, and the only app I have set to startup in my startup programs is iTunesHelper. I also tried setting it so it didn't boot into my login automatically, but instead of showing my desktop then going back to a blue screen it just shows the login screen for a few seconds and goes back to the blue screen.

The laptop is one of the original Macbooks, 1.83ghz, 512mb RAM and it's running 10.5.2. My hunch is something's wrong with the OS but I'm hoping that isn't the case. I'm trying to do a repair disk right now, although I doubt that'll be the problem--if it boots into safe mode with no issues, then the issue couldn't be the disk, could it?

[turtle]

I think you're right in that it's not a hardware issue. It sounds like your OS got corrupted. I'm not sure if there's anything other than an Archive and Install, but how bad would it be if you did that? Do you have a Time Machine backup? If so you can do a clean install and restore from backup.

[arnoct]

Nope, no Time Machine backup--it's a laptop, so carrying around with me an external hard drive to and from school is not really an effective plan.

Since I'm able to go into safe mode I did copy my important stuff to a USB Flash Drive; I just really didn't want to bother with the whole reinstalling of things, but I guess it's inevitable.

[turtle]

Originally Posted by arnoct Nope, no Time Machine backup--it's a laptop, so carrying around with me an external hard drive to and from school is not really an effective plan.

In a case like this I would still disagree. You can't afford not to have a good backup. Even if you only backed up once a night or every other day your situation now wouldn't be the same.

Since I'm able to go into safe mode I did copy my important stuff to a USB Flash Drive; I just really didn't want to bother with the whole reinstalling of things, but I guess it's inevitable.

At least you were able to get some stuff off the system. I don't know of another way to get the past your issue though. Maybe someone else knows a good trick that I'm missing.

[Taskiss]

Do you use a Logitech mouse? I had that very thing happen (or something similar, it was a while ago) 'till I removed the Logitech driver and just let Mac OS X handle the load.

Removing the mouse allowed me to boot.

[Wyatt]

Originally Posted by arnoct Nope, no Time Machine backup--it's a laptop, so carrying around with me an external hard drive to and from school is not really an effective plan.

A Time Machine drive doesn't always have to be plugged in. I only plug mine in every couple days, and it still works fine.

[PB PM]

Originally Posted by turtle2472 In a case like this I would still disagree. You can't afford not to have a good backup. Even if you only backed up once a night or every other day your situation now wouldn't be the same. At least you were able to get some stuff off the system. I don't know of another way to get the past your issue though. Maybe someone else knows a good trick that I'm missing.

Have to agree there. I take my MBP to school with me everyday, but I still plug it into my external at least once a week to run a backup. Now that I use Time Machine its a lot easier too.

[arnoct]

Well, as for the whole drive thing--there's also the fact that I don't own an external hard drive (nor can I really afford one at the moment, especially for a backup drive for a machine that I don't really use as my "main" computer.) I know I need to back up often but I don't.

Anyway, about weird drivers and stuff: no such luck. The only third-party drivers I do have installed are my printer drivers, and I've used my printer a few times in the last few days (even after 10.5.2 and the graphics update.) The machine is pretty stock all around; I only use it for school so basically the only nonstandard apps are iLife and iWork. I think I installed VLC at one point but I can't remember.

Checking the system log it's saying something is segfaulting while it's trying to draw the login window, so I think something in the OS in corrupted. I'm pretty useless when it comes to Mac troubleshooting, though, so I'm completely lost. If someone wants me to post the pertinent parts of my system.log (where I believe it's hanging up) I will, but if I can't figure this out by Saturday when I have a large chunk of time I think I'll probably reinstall. If I can fix this without doing that, though, it'd be pretty awesome, but it's looking like when it panicked the other day it probably corrupted some part of the OS.