MacBook Pro crashing

Hey everyone,

My late 2011 15" MacBook Pro (i7 2nd Gen, 4 GB, 750 GB, HD6770) started crashing last Friday. I have upgraded the RAM to 8 GB, removed the internal optical drive, replaced the 750 GB hard drive with a 120 GB OCZ Vertex 3 SSD, and moved the 750 GB hard drive to the optical drive bay. I had OSX installed on the Vertex 3, a ~200 GB Bootcamp Windows 7 partition on the 750 GB drive, and the remaining space on the 750 GB was given over to the original factory Mac partition which I kept for data storage (it still had OSX installed on it, but I never actually used the partition as a boot drive, my SSD OSX installation was my main one).

Last Friday morning, while I was in class, my MacBook suddenly did something I'd never seen before. While I was browsing the internet in Chrome, a message came up saying that the MacBook must shut down immediately. The background behind the message was darkened and the system was totally unresponsive until it eventually restarted. A bit of searching online revealed this issue to be something called a "kernel panic". It always happens within a few minutes of booting back up into the Vertex 3 installation of OSX, but the timing is different every time; sometimes I don't have time to even open an app up after booting up, but other times it lasts up to five minutes before crashing. Since this issue started happening, my Windows partition (on the 750 GB hard drive) will not boot either: it says that it needs to perform startup repair. If I perform the startup repair, it will give me a blue screen of death shortly after the loading screen for repair appears. If I do not perform the startup repair, the system will simply crash and restart. In addition, the original factory installation of OSX on the 750 GB hard drive (which I normally do not use) will not boot at all, and gives me a sort of "black screen of death" with error text when I attempt to boot from it. Prior to the kernel panic issue appearing, this OSX installation was bootable, and I had booted into it by accident about a week beforehand.

So now neither OS installed on the 750 GB drive will boot, but the OS on the SSD will, however it crashes soon after. I hypothesized therefore that the 750 GB drive had failed or was corrupt since there are quite a few apps (several dozen GB at least) that are stored on the 750 GB drive but installed under the SSD OS, so I thought perhaps it is these apps starting up after the OS boots from the SSD that were causing the kernel panic, and a bad drive would explain why neither OS on the drive boots properly. However, upon plugging the 750 GB drive into a spare SATA port on my desktop, all partitions appear and are reported as "Healthy" under Disk Management in Windows 7, and the files on the Bootcamp partition are visible and seem intact and functional from my preliminary testing. I am currently in the process of scanning the disk for errors with HD Tune Pro 5.00, but it appears to be totally fine according to that scan so far, so I'm not sure it's the hard drive any more.

I was able to recover two of the kernel panic reports upon rebooting the system after the crash, but the system crashed too quickly in most cases to have a chance to save the other reports. I have attached these reports to this thread. I was unable to recover dump files from the Windows 7 BSODs because they occured during the attempt to load startup repair, and the OS was not properly loaded so it appears that the dump files were not saved properly because they did not appear in the specified folder that they should have gone to.

I had originally thought the hard drive was the problem and I purchased a 750 GB Scorpio Black to replace it, but I'm not so sure now. Could the RAM or something else possibly be causing this type of issue? I'm really stumped here guys, any help of comments would be beautiful, thanks in advance.

Very long post, I know, so heres the TL;DR: MacBook Pro with SSD + 750 GB drives started kernel panicking 0-5min after boot into OSX on the SSD, OSX and Win 7 on the 750 GB both no longer boot. I thought the 750 had failed, but connecting to another PC showed all partitions as healthy and disk scan is showing no errors so far. What could it be?

I would maybe return the SSD to OCZ and ask for a replacement

Thanks for the suggestion and I'm going to test the OCZ drive next for drive errors and the like, but I don't understand how a bad SSD could cause not one, but two OS installations on a DIFFERENT drive to fail to boot. While I haven't ruled the Vertex 3 as a problem yet, I don't see how it could be causing this issue, because the SSD boots; I can get into OSX on it, if only for a short time. Admittedly, it crashes relatively quickly when I boot onto the OCZ drive, but could a bad SSD be itself bootable yet cause the 750 GB drive to not boot? It just doesn't seem likely

I am not a mac person, but I have one that I use occasionally. Try repairing disk permissions, or you cant even boot up?

Thanks for the suggestions guys, I happened to try Memtest86 first because the hard disks are currently unplugged for testing, and here's an image of what happened. I'm guessing this means that something is wrong with my memory? I upgraded the RAM to 2 Centon 4 GB DDR3 sticks that claimed Mac compatibility at the same time as I got the SSD, which was months and months ago now, must have been around September 2012. If it is the RAM that's causing the problem, could you link me to a quality 8 GB DDR3 kit for Mac?

Yeah Crucial is like the only mac memory I use

Unfortunately, I don't have the original RAM anymore, or any other RAM to test with really, so looks like I'll have to pick up another 8 GB kit. Thanks for the link SNGX, I know Macs can be really picky with RAM so I think I'll order the one you linked. I'll post again later with results once it comes in.

After some unexpected bills came up, I had to hold off buying the new RAM for the moment. However, I did open the MacBook back up and swapped out one of the 4 GB sticks for a 2 GB stick from my other laptop. OSX now appears to function correctly without any crashes at all, but since swapping the RAM stick, now whenever I boot into Windows 7, it will blue screen within about 5 minutes of getting to the desktop. Its really almost the exact same problem that was happening to OSX prior to swapping the RAM sticks. At least I can get INTO Windows now, but it still doesn't appear to be working. I ran memtest after swapping the 2 GB stick in, and it didn't report an error immediately, as it had before swapping the stick, but I haven't yet given it a chance to run fully. I'll post back with the results when I do. If memtest comes up all good, what else could be causing these random blue screens? I have dump files available to upload if necessary.

UPDATE (2:31PM EDT): I have found that Windows will BSOD as soon as a full screen 3D applicaton is launched. Not sure if this is relevant, but its the only thing I've found that consistently produces a problem. The blue screen shows the error: PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA, when this happens, although I have also seen other errors on previous blue screens on the MacBook.

Will this uninstall utility work on an Apple modified GPU?

I'll give your uninstall utility a shot either tonight or tomorrow when I've got a chance SNGX, thanks. I have previously tried to remove the default video driver that was installed with boot camp, but no other driver would ever install successfully except the original boot camp driver, which is from 2011. However, I don't believe I have ever tried using an uninstall utility to remove the old driver, I had only removed it by uninstalling it in Windows.

From a quick bit of google and forums searching, it seems that somehow the HD 6770M used in Macbooks is different than the 6770M used in regular laptops, and cannot use the same drivers at the regular ones, even under Windows. I'm not 100% sure that this is the case with the video card, but I found a few forum posts talking about it. I'll link them when I manage to find them again; I'm currently at school so it'll have to be later.

Also, I'll make sure to give memtest a few passes to see if the memory is the problem. Thanks for the suggestions!

I dont think they will be effective under OSX, but I am wondering how this could cure the crashing in OSX ? You are just attending to the windows part of the issue right?

Oh man, I didnt read that, my bad.

I'm really stumped now. The original problem from the first post (random crashes after boot in OSX, and Windows BSODs on boot and/or fails to boot) came back, without me changing anything whatsoever hardware wise, and all I did software wise was install Internet Explorer 5 for Mac on OSX. Seeing that all configurations of the RAM I currently owned were giving the "Unexpected Interrupt - Halting" error on memtest86, I went out and bought 2x4 GB of Centon dual channel DDR3, which was specified as being made specifically for Macs, and said guaranteed compatibility on the packaging. Upon installing this RAM (which I now cannot return since it's been opened ), I have seen no change whatsoever in the symptoms. Even memtest86 is still giving the same error "Unexpected Interrupt - Halting" that I've been seeing since the first time I ran it after your suggestion SNGX. Both hard drives checked out when I checked them, and the RAM is fine :S This has really got me baffled guys.

Sorry for the late response, I've been busy lately playing SimCity a little bit too much

Anyway, I tried the hardware test SNGX, and it hangs every single time right away within 1 minute of starting the test, always while testing the memory, even though I just replaced the memory with two brand new Mac compatible 4 GB DDR3 sticks, which have been tested and work just fine in my HP laptop. It seems to me that it's pretty much got to be the motherboard at this point. I'm really hoping Apple will replace it under warranty since I paid $2600 for this machine only 15 months ago...

Thank you for all your help so far though. I think I'm going to bring it in to the Apple store and see what they can do about it.