Chosen Solution
My Mid 2011 MacBook Air restarted because of error a few times last week. Then on one of the restarts I got a panic code: panic(cpu 8 caller 0xffffff80237afbab) Since then, my screen is black and only the fan runs high when turned on. Tried resetting PRAM and SMC multiple times with no luck - keyboard keys seem unresponsive. Caps lock will not light up. The LED on the MagSafe power adapter stays solid green when attached. I removed the SSD and used an OWC Envoy to plug SSD into my girlfriends MacBook. Drive ran and I was able to access all my files. Tried booting MacBook Air with the SSD plugged into the USB and also did not work. What’s the next troubleshooting step? I read that “panic (cpu 8 caller 0xffffff80237afbab)” indicates SSD failure. Would I be able to boot in another computer if the SSD was bad?
Panic errors can run between hardware issues to software problems. So it’s sometimes hard to pin point without doing some diagnostic process to isolate which. From the sounds of it you did that by testing out your SSD drive with a second system. While accessing the files tells us the drive is readable it still could have issues if you haven’t run Disk Utility on it from your girlfriends Mac. Just make sure you’ve copied off anything important first (ideally a full backup), then Run Disk Utility on your drive. In addition to that I would create a bootable USB thumb drive so you have a known fresh OS to see if that works. But sadly, I think we’re going down the wrong path here thinking it’s a SSD or software issue. My thinking is the logic board has an issue. In this case the error and the lack of any reactions is telling us the CPU has failed.
