After reinstalling the OS I managed to get everything back up and running again, although I still had a small problem with the Airport card not automatically joining my wireless network. It's not a major problem at the moment, but it is irritating. So, I thought I'd have a look at the Airport options on my PowerBook and ensure that they were the same on my Mini. What a mistake this turned to to be! Bang - kernel panic on startup again!

While my Mini was panicking, I wasn't this time around because I knew what I'd been toying with. After a quick dig around on my PowerBook, I found the preferences file that represents what you see in the Airport configuration of the System Preferences Network panel. You can find it at /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences.plist and if you open this up, it's just an XML file containing a bunch of name-value pairs in a fairly human readable form.

To fix my Mini, I booted it up in target/Firewire disk mode and connected it to my PowerBook. I then opened this file and manually changed some of the values from 1 back to 0, restoring them to their "unselected" values. Thankfully, before long the Mini was back up and running again and I knew exactly which setting had caused the crash. Just to confirm, I reselected the same option and rebooted, shortly after which I was presented with the kernel panic. Excellent, I know exactly which option not to mess with anymore : Disconnect on logout.

To fix my problem, I simply changed the value of the "Disconnect on logout" property from 1 to 0. An alternative way of getting to this file is to boot from your Mac OS X DVD1 (insert the disk and hold down C) and load up the Terminal from there to modify the file directly.

<key>Disconnect on logout</key>
<integer>0</integer>

If you've stumbled across my blog and are having similar problems with your Intel Mini, I hope this saves you the irritation I've had!

Responses[2]

Posted by Simon Brown on 16 March 2006 23:07:02 GMT #