Kernel Panic - how to fix?

i have another notebook i can use.  is there a demo of disk warrior i can use?  also, how do i get into target mode?

Just connect the two Macs with a firewire cable with the bootable mac on and the nonbootable  one off. Then power on the  problematic one while holding down the t key. A t will appear on the screen of the problematic one and then its drive will appear on  the desktop of the good one. As far as DW goes no it does not have a demo but it is well worth buying. It should be number one in any Mac's owner's bag of tricks. I suppose you could try to grab one off the p2p file sharing networks but please buy it as it is good software that should be supported. Again, you could try the fsck command before trying anything else.

can you explain the fsck command?  i booted up the nonbooting mac and have the firewire drive on my desktop.

i was able to get a copy of diskwarrior and rebuilt the hard drive, but i am still getting this.

any ideas?  could this be hard ware?

On the positive side since you can boot to target mode you can move off any software you don't have backups of. . You have to see if your machine will boot into single user mode to run it.
Steps to Enter Single-User or Verbose Mode

      1. Shut down the computer if it is on.
      2. Press the power button to start the computer.
      3. Immediately press and hold the Command (Apple) key and one of the following:
          o the "s" key for single-user mode.
          o the "v" key for verbose mode.
      4. To exit single-user mode type: reboot
      5. Press Return.
if you can get into single user mode then:
# At the command-line prompt, type /sbin/fsck -fy
# Press Return. fsck will go through five "phases" and then return information about your disk's use and fragmentation. Once it finishes, it'll display this message if no issue is found:

    ** The volume (name_of_volume) appears to be OK

If fsck found issues and has altered, repaired, or fixed anything, it will display this message:

    ***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214
There are other steps with fsck you cab try in this article.

i copied all the software off and am doing an archive and install as we speak.    prior to this, i did run a disk utility permissions repair and it did repair.

i hope i can get back up to my desktop and copy this software over.  

ill post back once this is done copying

hi

i got it fixed.  im not sure what fixed it --whether it was the archive/install or the disk permission reset and diskwarrior

after the archive/install finished, it took me right back to my desktop with all the icons.  all the programs work too!

thanks alot for the help guys.  how should i give the points away?  can i give you both 500?

No,just split it if you want as you are not sure what fixed it. On the other hand I would still strongly advise that you repair permissions and reinstall the manual update that caused the problem in the first place. This will give you a full copy of all update files. As of now, I am no longer using their auto updater as these problems are becoming too frequent.