17" PB Locks up (like a PC!!)

[mainstreetmark]

Yep. Another lockup. Man, I switched back to Mac because I was tired of XP locking up.

Anyways, as usual, iTunes was running, and I'm nearly ready to blame it for these problems, because it's always happened when iTunes was running. Never when I'm watching a DVD or something. According to Menumeters, the drive is always "reading".

Yet, I've also been using dreamweaver, copying large amounts of data to external disks, ripping a DVD and running a system wide search for some file, AND using iTunes and everything is fine. I've also played the song that was playing during lockup, after rebooting. I just can't nail down the problem here.

I'm using a completely new iTunes database, so I know that the main iTunes file is probably fine, since it's not even on the same spot on the disk (heck, I have like 6 "bad" iTunes databases that it's created so far)

I'd reformat and install, but I can't locate my Panther disks, and I'd hate to move back to Jag. I'd just copy the whole install to another disk, format, and copy back, but I'd be afraid of carrying the infection back over.

It HAS to be some hardware issue, but if it was something as simple as a bad sector on the disk, I would be able to reproduce it by accessing the same file or something. I've seen external firewire drives beachball things while it spun up, indicating that the OS knows how to handle slow-loading drive data, but this freezes the whole OS. I can't do anything but listen to three seconds of music every 15 to 20 seconds.

I just don't know what to do...

 

[yellow]

It HAS to be some hardware issue, but if it was something as simple as a bad sector on the disk, I would be able to reproduce it by accessing the same file or something. I've seen external firewire drives beachball things while it spun up, indicating that the OS knows how to handle slow-loading drive data, but this freezes the whole OS. I can't do anything but listen to three seconds of music every 15 to 20 seconds.

I wouldn't go that far just yet. There's lots of info you still need to focus on before it's a hardware issue. It's definintly not par for the course for OSX to lock up/KP. If you think it's iTunes, what iTunes plugins or other iTunes controlling software do you have installed? Remove it. What haxies or other OS/GUI hacks do you have running? Remove them. What Startup Items are you running? Try starting up without them. Again, remove all peripherals. No mice, no FW drives, nothing. Just Powerbook. If you don't get back to basics, you'll never find the problem.

A quick solution? Create and use a new login for a while to see if it locks up on you. If not, then the problem is most likely relegated to your current user. If it still locks up/KPs, then the problem has been relegated to OS, hardware, or peripherals.

You only ran memtest for a 5 minutes. To get an accurate return, you need to run it for hours.