KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE

Question

Did an archive and install of 10.5 from 10.4.10 two days ago. Everything worked except for an occasional error (very rare) until this morning. Everything was working fine last night.
Stickies takes 10 tries to open.
iTunes gives a KERNPROTECTIONFAILURE after a minute or two of use.
Firefox gives a KERNPROTECTIONFAILURE and wont open.
I'm sure I'll find more as the day goes on. Looking like I'll have to do a full wipe and re-install 10.5.
There goes half my day!
Zach Jennings

Answer 1

Pete:
These things can be pretty tricky sometimes. Once on an old Mac, waaay before OSX, I had it crash and restarting gave me the icon of death and that little musical note of death, very bad signs. I tried everything I could for 4 hours, nothing worked.
Another guy in the office, who was very knowledgeable on Macs, said it looked like the motherboard was dead to him. I sat and thought about it for a bit, ran numbers on how much money I had available, but couldn't think of anything else to do.
But I decided to restart it one last time, just to be sure. **** thing started right up and I used it for years after that with no problem at all.
But, I think you have to seriously entertain the notion of a damaged hard drive from dropping it and back it up to an external firewire disk, and do that often.
All a hard drive is, is this little rocker arm moving at high speed over a spinning optical disk, pretty fragile. It's amazing they don't break more often.