Kernel panic boot loop

[ltinsley]

This morning I noticed my MacBook Air (2014, running Sierra) was not going to sleep when I shut the lid. Thinking it needed a simple restart, I hit the power button. When I attempted to turn it back on, I got a kernel panic log message with "DontStealMacOS" in the description. (I apologize for my lack of technical lingo; I have very little knowledge in this area.) I was not able to start up in SafeMode. I tried the command+alt+P+R thing, waiting for the chime three times. My husband also put High Sierra on a bootable flash drive and tried to boot from that instead of the main hard drive. I was able to select the USB drive but it went back into a boot loop again instead of starting up (the flash drive worked on a different computer).

Is this a hardware issue? Am I in for paying a bunch of money?

 

[madrich]

I would take it to an Apple Genius in the Apple Store, they have tools to test the hardware. There is a way for you to test the Mac hardware, but you need to google it. However, I think it is not the same as in the store.