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Makosuke

macrumors 604
Aug 15, 2001
6,661
1,242
The Cool Part of CA, USA
Your problems sound suspiciously like some kind of hardware conflict--bad RAM or a peripheral Tiger just doesn't like--but it's always hard to tell. I tend to start clean then add possible causes of trouble until I run into the issue.

In my case, though this isn't likely to be of much help, I've had Tiger running quite happily on a 1st gen DP G5, but it so happens that I went all-out with the clean install process. Here's what I did when upgrading:

1) Complete backup of 10.3, wiped the drive, installed a totally fresh copy of Tiger.
2) Allowed the migration thingy to move over my users (only), although that ended up choking on my main useer and not copying anything for some reason.
3) As such, I manually copied all my user data, but from that user's Library folder I ONLY copied the prefs and handful of items I was positive I needed (Mail stuff, for example). Anything else, I figured I'd re-set or re-install, if there were problems.
4) I then reinstalled all pertinent apps from the original installers instead of copying over, just to make sure everything was as it should be and I had the latest versions. As always, though, I avoided any system extensions that I didn't really need--only the driver for my Logitec mouse, in this case.
5) Even doing all this, 10.4.0 was a little flaky for me, but as of 10.4.1 it worked pretty well, and 10.4.2 has been very solid--better than any version of 10.3. As always, I used the "combo" 10.4.2 updater for that install.

Note that I'm not usually this careful--I had done a straight "upgrade" install through every versioni of OSX from 10.0 through 10.3, including mirroring the same install when upgrading from a G4 to a G5, and although this had worked ok, apparently as a result a background process had a tendancy to get stuck and eat an entire processor on my G5 under 10.3, so I decided to go all out and start fresh with Tiger. It took four days (less than the week I'd estimated) before everything was working comfortably again, but it was probably worth the hassle.

Currently at 20 days with 10.4.2, and that includes a bunch of video editing, DVD mastering and burning, two simultaneous users, sleeping frequently, and a lot of oddball stuff on the side. Also, I'm not an uptime fanatic at home, I just haven't had a reason to restart in that long.
 

beatle888

macrumors 68000
Feb 3, 2002
1,690
0
alangyssler said:
grr... I'm glad others are having good fortune with Tiger. What did you do? Or more importantly, what can I do, or what did I do wrong? I reinstall after erasing, and immediately repair permissions, and do so in between every step practically. Then, apply updates. The install graphics software. Repair permissions. Restart. Install recording applications, repair permissions, restart. Install other applications (office, etc), repair permissions, restart. Then put on my personal documents, repair permissions, restart. Then run Mac Janitor, and repair permissions until I think I'm going to wear the darn button out in Disk Utility. Then restart. Then, about three weeks later, something goes awry, and everything starts moving like molasses in January, and I get the beachball of death all over. Start ups get slower, and my Finder starts acting up. Spotlight gets less and less usable. I have to Force Quit more and more frequently.

Is it possible there's something wrong with my Installer DVD? I can't imagine so, but that's one of the things that I've wondered. All this makes me want to go out and buy a mini, and try installing the same way on there, to see if I can repeat the problem. Perhaps some of my other installers aren't working properly.

<mutter under breath>stupid Tiger</mutter>


DUDE that SUCKS. it seems to me that youve done nothing wrong. yet i dont know if its really tiger. it MIGHT be third party hardware? maybe the internet modem?

try to take ONE system and zero out that hard drive and clean install. dont install or hook up ANYTHING. not even the internet modem and run that...JUST the OSX for a few days and see what happens.
 

beatle888

macrumors 68000
Feb 3, 2002
1,690
0
alangyssler said:
yikes. I'll try taking the gig stick out today, then. I would hate to think it's bad, as it's only about a month and half old. That'd suck. I'll try it through. Thanks for your help! I'm going to reinstall apps one at a time in Tiger, and see where it goes wrong, then reinstall in Panther, if need be. This is going be a long, lllooonnnnng process, but (hopefully) well worth it. Bleh. I hate reinstalling.


NOOOOOOOOO! ;)


dont install other apps right now. Just install tiger.
 

alangyssler

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 5, 2005
74
0
Buffalo Grove, IL
Thanks, everyone!

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this thread. I appreciate your helpful suggestions. I'll be working on troubleshooting my desktop once I get back to school this upcoming Monday, and get all set up again. It'll be a long, slow process, but it will be nice to finally know what the problem is, and be able to keep my system healthy for more than a couple weeks again.

I think you've all renewed my potential for faith in Tiger. Now I just need to figure out how to make a bootable disk image, because Disk Utility doesn't seem to do the trick.

Thanks again, everyone. I'll post updates, as they occur.
 

nsheikh80

macrumors regular
May 2, 2005
215
0
London, England
Its a real shame that you're having problems. I am quite fortunate in that Tiger is my first experience with a Mac OS so I don't have anything to really compare it with but if it crashed all over the place I would know that its PANTS!

All I can say is that I am not having any problems. I always do an Erase and Install when I install Tiger.
 

Marble

macrumors 6502a
May 13, 2003
771
5
Tucson, AZ
I'm in a similar, if somewhat less leaky boat than yourself. As a college student, I thankfully could afford the time I have taken configuring and managing various installations of Tiger on my Rev.D Titanium. The brightness controls didn't work for two months (until 10.4.2), Spotlight gave my external drive a heart attack through repeated reindexing, I got locked with my screen in rotated configuration (don't ask), and am thoroughly frustrated with a very unreliable dashboard that won't open a number of widgets.

Argh!
 

aquajet

macrumors 68020
Feb 12, 2005
2,386
9
VA
alangyssler said:
grr... I'm glad others are having good fortune with Tiger. What did you do? Or more importantly, what can I do, or what did I do wrong? I reinstall after erasing, and immediately repair permissions, and do so in between every step practically. Then, apply updates. The install graphics software. Repair permissions. Restart. Install recording applications, repair permissions, restart. Install other applications (office, etc), repair permissions, restart. Then put on my personal documents, repair permissions, restart. Then run Mac Janitor, and repair permissions until I think I'm going to wear the darn button out in Disk Utility. Then restart. Then, about three weeks later, something goes awry, and everything starts moving like molasses in January, and I get the beachball of death all over. Start ups get slower, and my Finder starts acting up. Spotlight gets less and less usable. I have to Force Quit more and more frequently.

Sorry to hear about your troubles. Not sure what the problem is, but may I suggest that you quit the obsessive permissions repairs? It's really not necessary. And unless an installer requests a restart, you don't need to do it.

But I do feel your pain. It certainly is frustrating dealing with such issues. I like Tiger, but I'm also irritated by some serious issues regarding networking in Windows environments. Win 2k servers don't show up in the Network browser, you have to type the exact name into "Connect to server". If the Win 2k server has Services for Macintosh installed, Tiger refuses to connect to the server through Samba, only through AppleTalk. And most troubling, Virtual Private Networking simply doesn't work in Tiger. From what I hear these annoying problems will be addressed in 10.4.3.
 

rendezvouscp

macrumors 68000
Aug 20, 2003
1,526
0
Long Beach, California
powermac666 said:
Wow, that really sucks. I upgraded both my 1.33 PowerBook and 800 iMac G4 to Tiger via archive and install. The only problem I had was having to fix Photoshop on my PB because dragging files onto the dock icon didn't open them up.

Hey, just curious what you did to fix that PB problem because Photoshop does the same thing to me.

As for the Tiger in question: make sure you don't set your drive to case sensitive!!! I had problems before when I set my drive to be journaled and case sensitive, and now that I reformatted it to just journaled Tiger runs like a dream. Good luck!
-Chase
 

Nermal

Moderator
Staff member
Dec 7, 2002
20,595
3,936
New Zealand
alangyssler said:
I think you've all renewed my potential for faith in Tiger.

My faith in Tiger will be renewed when they un-remove the ability to customise number formats :mad: (or at least get the settings for NZ right)

Edit: Apparently you can fix this by using the prefpane from 10.3.9. Trying that now :)

Edit 2: Yay, numbers are formatted correctly now! FINALLY!
 

Nermal

Moderator
Staff member
Dec 7, 2002
20,595
3,936
New Zealand
I had to do a clean install to get it running decently. An upgrade was horrible. If you do a search, you should be able to find my posts about it when I first got Tiger.
 

Applespider

macrumors G4
alangyssler said:
I think you've all renewed my potential for faith in Tiger. Now I just need to figure out how to make a bootable disk image, because Disk Utility doesn't seem to do the trick.

Get Superduper and do a back up to an external drive. Then test it by restarting from there... Very handy to have around - it's free to try (and for basic back ups) and $20 if you want to use the safety clone features (which might be useful in your testing period since it allows you to rollback) or the incremental backup features.

Another suggestion - have you repaired the HD through disk utility? Boot from the Tiger DVD or from an external drive, go into disk utility and repair HD to see if there are any dodgy sectors on it.

Good luck!
 

TBi

macrumors 68030
Jul 26, 2005
2,583
6
Ireland
alangyssler said:
yikes. I'll try taking the gig stick out today, then. I would hate to think it's bad, as it's only about a month and half old. That'd suck. I'll try it through. Thanks for your help! I'm going to reinstall apps one at a time in Tiger, and see where it goes wrong, then reinstall in Panther, if need be. This is going be a long, lllooonnnnng process, but (hopefully) well worth it. Bleh. I hate reinstalling.

Not sure if anyone else said this but you might not have bad ram, you might just have ram which is bad for an apple. Unless you bought apple specific memory from crucial or a similar company.

When i put a stick of ram into my cousins iBook from my dell it wasn't fully compatible and even after taking it out OSX ran like tripe. The lovely beachball could be seen everywhere you went on the machine. Only a full reinstall on a clean system fixed this (well actually installing tiger did but i think thats because their panther disk was scratched). Try running that system test utility that Apple put on one of the disks you got with your system.

Alternatively something else could be the cause but i'm guessing it is hardware related. Unless of course you have gone back to panther and are not having any problems.
 

skunk

macrumors G4
Jun 29, 2002
11,758
6,107
Republic of Ukistan
I was an "early adopter", but fairly cautious with it. I installed Tiger (twice) on my Cube, but not on anything else. The first install was an "upgrade", which was awful, loads of problems, Spotlight didn't work properly, Word '04 kept crashing, totally unstable. Then I did an "archive and install", which reduced the existing problems, though Spotlight was still flaky, but made Illustrator, iPhoto and Photoshop refuse to work together: any two open woud cause a quit, a hang or a kernel panic. I finally reverted to Panther, which was refreshingly stable. After about three weeks, and a couple of fixes (10.4.1 and 2), I thought I'd try again: complete wipe, two partitions, one with Panther, one with Tiger. Now everything works OK, but I've got my Panther partition as a back-up, just in case. If everything goes well for the next couple of months, I'll probably wipe the Panther partition and load Tiger onto my other Macs, but I'm going to make damn sure it's sorted before I do.
I feel your pain, but I would suggest the scrub down/two partition route as a compromise. Best of both worlds if you've got the drive space.
 

alangyssler

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 5, 2005
74
0
Buffalo Grove, IL
as soon as i get a chance to do so (school is starting up this next monday), i'll be getting myself a copy of SuperDuper (probably purchasing it, that is), and reinstalling, after repairing the hd again. i have two 120 gig drives in my tower, plus an external 200 gig, so hd space isn't an issue. i think i might partition it in three parts - one for 10.3.9, a second for 10.4.2, and a third for my files. that way, if something gets hosed with a system, my stuff is safe. or perhaps keep all my files on the second hd, where all my movies, music and home recording stuff is.

as for the bad ram, i ran hardware check when i first got the new sticks, and it didn't show any errors.... i suppose i could try again, though.
 

baummer

macrumors 65816
Jan 18, 2005
1,235
292
Southern California
You know, it appears as though your problem can be tracked down to two things:

1. Permissions repairing: You do this WAY TOO often. What you should do is install everything (Tiger, apps, etc.) and THEN repair permissions.

2. RAM - Try replacing the ram and see if this works. Chances are, this will fix most of your issues.

Good luck!
 

kwikdeth

macrumors 65816
Feb 25, 2003
1,136
1,706
Tempe, AZ
tiger is a mixed bag for me. the worst thing is Spotlight. absolutely worst. "feature". ever.
Best example? I told spotlight to find a folder called "Music" that was at the root level of my hard drive. Search Results: 0 Matches. WORTHLESS!!!!!!
 

law guy

macrumors 6502a
Jan 17, 2003
997
0
Western Massachusetts
As for what I did, I updated a PM g4 dual 1.42 and a 1.5 GHz PB - I simply popped the disc in; installed, very quick upgrades, and it has worked fine since that time for the past several months. No tweaks or issues. It's interesting that tiger is causing several issues for you, esp. your newer iBook. I echo questions re: hardware changes / issues, e.g. ram. Here's hoping you can get back to a relatively issue free mac experience soon.
 

belvdr

macrumors 603
Aug 15, 2005
5,945
1,372
I think Tiger has been the worst OS for upgrades. 10.2 achieved speed and reliability. 10.3 added some nice features like Expose and Mail worked better for me. Now 10.4 doesn't really do anything to benefit me in the least. Since the 10.4.3 update, my iMac pauses on boot while it gets the Airport card ready.
 

rendezvouscp

macrumors 68000
Aug 20, 2003
1,526
0
Long Beach, California
kwikdeth said:
tiger is a mixed bag for me. the worst thing is Spotlight. absolutely worst. "feature". ever.
Best example? I told spotlight to find a folder called "Music" that was at the root level of my hard drive. Search Results: 0 Matches. WORTHLESS!!!!!!

I know this sounds stupid, but are you sure it was Spotlight's fault? Most people don't have a folder named "Music" at the root of their hard drive. The syntax of your search might have also been at fault. What did you search for exactly?

As for me, Tiger has been a great OS. Very few bugs (if any) that bug me regularly.
-Chasen
 

belvdr

macrumors 603
Aug 15, 2005
5,945
1,372
rendezvouscp said:
I know this sounds stupid, but are you sure it was Spotlight's fault? Most people don't have a folder named "Music" at the root of their hard drive.

An index shouldn't care about location. That's plain nonsense that it didn't find it.
 

ReanimationLP

macrumors 68030
Jan 8, 2005
2,782
33
On the moon.
If you still have your orginal CDs, run the Apple Hardware Tests. Tiger shouldnt be doing that, it may be a bad piece of hardware.

Tiger for me installed beautifully on my G4. Popped the disc into it, it restarted, and a half hour later, Tiger was done installing and I was on the desktop. Very snappy and fast.
 
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