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I have a Mac Book Pro (late 2008, unibody design). Recently I replaced the HD with a crucial SSD and added more RAM (2x 4GB instead of 2x 2GB). I also installed Mac OSX Lion on it. It worked fine for a few days but then started to crash. Either the screen froze or the OSX Kernel panic dialog showed up telling me to reboot.

I looked at the crash reports but have no idea what exactly is causing the crash (seems the look different every time) Here is the last one, I can post all of them if that helps.

Mon Aug  1 16:01:16 2011
panic(cpu 0 caller 0xffffff80002c268d): Kernel trap at 0xffffff80002a9ea2, type 14=page fault, registers:
CR0: 0x0000000080010033, CR2: 0x0000000000000118, CR3: 0x0000000044c71000, CR4: 0x0000000000000660
RAX: 0xffff7f8111e64000, RBX: 0xffffff800df9f540, RCX: 0xfffeffffffffffff, RDX: 0xffffff800df9f558
RSP: 0xffffff8111e2b4f0, RBP: 0xffffff8111e2b570, RSI: 0x0000000000000000, RDI: 0x000000000000982a
R8:  0xffffff80ccf90000, R9:  0x0000000000000000, R10: 0x000000000000ecca, R11: 0x0000000000000dc9
R12: 0x00000000000000e0, R13: 0x0000000000000ff8, R14: 0xffffff800df9f540, R15: 0xffffff8111e64000
RFL: 0x0000000000010202, RIP: 0xffffff80002a9ea2, CS:  0x0000000000000008, SS:  0x0000000000000000
CR2: 0x0000000000000118, Error code: 0x0000000000000000, Faulting CPU: 0x0

Backtrace (CPU 0), Frame : Return Address
0xffffff8111e2b1b0 : 0xffffff8000220702 
0xffffff8111e2b230 : 0xffffff80002c268d 
0xffffff8111e2b3d0 : 0xffffff80002d7a3d 
0xffffff8111e2b3f0 : 0xffffff80002a9ea2 
0xffffff8111e2b570 : 0xffffff800027f60d 
0xffffff8111e2b5d0 : 0xffffff8000273add 
0xffffff8111e2b6c0 : 0xffffff800027487a 
0xffffff8111e2b6f0 : 0xffffff800026e7c2 
0xffffff8111e2b720 : 0xffffff80002261e2 
0xffffff8111e2b740 : 0xffffff800022643d 
0xffffff8111e2b00 : 0xf`fff8000

I have no warranty anymore but would be glad if there is a way to figure out what's causing the crash and get it repaired for a reasonable price. Should I just hand it over to the next Apple store and ask them to repair it?

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did you try to boot with fresh Lion? Try to install it on an external drive and boot it from there just to be sure. – Enrico Susatyo Aug 1 '11 at 14:24
I have a fresh (non-upgraded) Lion install, remember that I replaced the hd with an SSD. – Nils Aug 1 '11 at 14:26
So it may be either bad RAM or HD. Can you try to plug in your old RAM and maybe HD? – Enrico Susatyo Aug 1 '11 at 14:37
I already gave the older RAMs away.. since I saw no use for them anymore. Could this be related to a problem with the Nvidia GPUs? Booted from an external drive and it didn't crash so far. The graphics are not accelerated when running the Lion installer I think. – Nils Aug 1 '11 at 14:39
I'm not sure. I have a mac about as old as yours, and incidentally I've also just replaced my RAM and was about to sell it on ebay. However I'm not sure if your graphic card causes this. I'd go to the apple store if I were you. They'd at least tell you the cause before asking you to pay. – Enrico Susatyo Aug 1 '11 at 14:43
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1 Answer

up vote 1 down vote

Since I note that it sometimes beeps three times when turning on (and then it doesn't boot) I assumed that one of the (newly bought!!) RAMs is faulty. Having two of them I removed the first and booted again. After a few minutes it crashed. I therefore assume that the first one is fault. I exchanged the RAM modules and run it now with the other one for almost an hour. No problems so far..

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you can also try to get memtest86 running on it. that'll test all your memory for you – tkone Nov 30 '11 at 2:05

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