My MacBook Pro worked all normal when all of a sudden it went black. It tried to reboot itself but immediately produced a kernel panic.
From then on I was never able to boot again. I could only enter my password (not for logging in to Mac OS, but for booting) and then the kernel panic would happen each time.
The error log was only visible for a few seconds and then it rebooted itself again. I was able to take a photograph of the kernel error. I have no idea what actually happened, so I wonder if anyone of you can make sense of the error message or identify the reason why the system failed?
The only thing that gives me a hint is the line about Core Storage Driver. In fact, I set up a HDD and SSD as a FusionDrive as explained in this article. I did this in november and used the MacBook every day since. Never had a problem until yesterday.
Luckily, I had a fresh backup and have been able to restore everything in the meantime. I checked both the SSD and HDD drive with disk utility for errors but everything seems fine.
Any idea what actually caused the error?
Best Answer
Understanding a panic is quite easy: The core scheduler for the OS got lost in the weeds. This is a fail-safe in that the computer decides to stop running itself.
You can see these files after a restart by looking in
/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReportsand especially if you have several that recur (in the same day or hour) it is sometimes useful to compare the reasons and patterns in the file.Back to the high level - how to understand this design is that some fundamental things went so wrong in the core of the operating system, the designers have all concluded that it's almost certainly worse to keep running with this error than to halt the computer immediately.
Think of this as a fail-safe at the level where the computer decides what program or instruction gets to run next. The computer is literally out of ideas how to continue, so it dumps what it was working on (as best as it can recollect now that things are off the rails) and stops immediately.
Kernel Panics are some of the hardest to debug unless you have one that you know exactly how to trigger it. In that case, it's pretty easy to keep eliminating possibilities until the source is obvious. Here is the best writeup of Mac specific information on Understanding and Debugging Kernel Panics. It is very technical, so take what you wish and move on to the steps below.
Like anything, it's best to isolate the problem to avoid chasing down thousands of potential causes. If you want to be systematic about how you isolate the cause (or worse causes) of a panic, here are the two articles with general steps for isolating software causes before investigating hardware.
In your specific case - Core Storage is either the root cause or just an innocent next bystander that "falls into the hole" that another process left behind. Good Luck if you decide to isolate this, hopefully it was a one-off error and you can just use your Mac in peace.