How to find a cause of a Kernel Panic message, or BSoD? How to understand why Beautiful Screen of Death1 appeared?



When I tried to find what happened using "Console" I couldn't find anything useful in logs? There's no 'panic' or 'SIG*' in logs, so what should I look for?

Where does OSX writes the cause of it's death?


1 I'm not sure that it's called BSoD on OSX, but it doesn't look like kernel panic screen (black screen in text mode) either.
The kernel panic text is added to the log after you restart the computer, assuming that you did not reset PRAM (the kernel panic text is stored in PRAM until you restart). In Mac OS X v10.6, the logs are located in in /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports. In Mac OS X v10.5, the logs are located in /Library/Logs/PanicReporter (source)


If you cannot find these files, or they contain no information on the kernel panic, then there is likely something wrong with the hardware of the computer.  Running a system diagnostic or visiting the genius bar is probably your next step.

If you are really interested in attempting to resolve the issue yourself, you might find this guide to resolving OS X kernel panics helpful.