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AppleCare Help

A

Albone

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 22, 2003
120
0
My 20 inch intel iMac has been seizing up for the last three weeks. Sometimes, I could go a whole day before the beach ball of doom would appear, one time it seized 4 times in ten minutes. Applejack, mac janitor, Disk Utility, it still did it so I took it in to the Genius Bar because my AppleCare runs to the end of 2010.

The computer seized in front of the tech!!!!! That NEVER happens. The tech immediately ordered a logic board, guessing that was it and to expect a call in 3 to 5 days. 3 days later, "You can pick up your mac, we found nothing wrong with it." WTF? We ran it for 20 hours, blah, blah, blah. The guy I talked to even admitted that while that doesn't mean there *isn't* anything wrong with it, he just can't get the problem to show itself.

So, four days after that, the iMac is seizing again. The only program that is truly open all the time is Suitcase X1 but I can't imagine that's the problem. Do I take it back to the Apple Store for a chance that they can fix it? Or suffer through frustrating freezes? One odd thing, there is never a startup chime when I turn the computer on or at restart.

(BTW, SL is not a viable option. Anything Adobe Air won't work, Suitcase bombs out which takes out Illustrator and that's just the short list.)
 
Infrared said:
Yes. Be polite and persistent.



Certainly not.




Is the volume muted when you shut the machine down?

Good luck!
Click to expand...

Thanks for the advice!

I don't ever mute the volume when I shut down, and the volume is ready to go on startup.
 
I agree, be persistent. If you would like a bit more ammunition an information when you take it in, you could try these things to gather some more information:

When you bring up this computer, get it's IP address - one way to do this is type "ifconfig" from a terminal. Make a note of this address and try to ping it from another machine on your network to make sure nothing is preventing pings at a normal state. When the seize occurs, from another machine on your network:

First try to ping the troubled mac:
ping <address>

If that doesn't work, then the machine is truly seized. If that does work, chances are the machine is still running - just the UI is frozen. Once you get logged in, get a list of running processes:

ps aux >processes.txt

This will create a file named processes.txt that tell you what processes are running at the time. If you just type "ps aux" or "top" you will get the list of processes where you can see them. At this point, you could start killing processes with the "kill" command to see if the UI becomes responsive after one of them is killed.

I hope some of this helps ... good luck.
 
Scooby, I was just running Front Row and my computer seized. From another computer, I was able to ping it and it was responsive.

I'm sorry to say that I didn't quite follow your next set of instructions. Would I do the Kill function from the remote machine? And, the log file didn't seem very descriptive in what program I'd be killing. Any sort of shorthand for that?
 
Oops, I forgot a sentence or two in there.

On the remote machine type:

ssh <username>@<ipaddress>

After you log in, type the command:

ps aux |grep -i front

You will see something like this:

user 3879 0.0 5.9 365964 61860 ?? S 7:53PM 0:02.31 /System/Library/CoreServices/Front Row.app/Contents/MacOS/Front Row

Notice the bolded process ID

Now, type the command below, but replace the PID of 3879 with the one from the output of your "ps" command.

kill 3879

Now do the "ps" command above again to make sure the process died. If not type the command:

kill -9 3879

See if the sick mac becomes responsive. If it does, pass this information on to apple care - it might give them a hint as to what the problem may be.
 
If you take it back to the apple store, be polite indeed, but be assertive as well. Make sure they know what you want, and you won't settle.
 
Thanks Scooby, when I can I will try it. And thanks Boston. I will be taking the mac into the Apple Store in the morning.

I was backing up my computer and 4 times it bombed. That's right, four times I had to try and time machine backup my computer and then it finally went through. Guess what's happening now. When I try to start up now, I get this flashing question mark that won't go away.

Not being sarcastic at all, but is all of this related or do I just have some bad luck?
 
Mine started doing the same thing yours is doing almost 4 weeks ago as well. Even got the HD ? on startup once and had to do a total reinstall of the OS. For me, it looks like my HD fan is out. iStat pro shows it at 0 rpm, and SMCfancontrol can't get it moving at any rpm. I've had it running for 3 days straight under no load with no problems, probably much like the geniuses would do in their test.

Have you run the Apple Hardware Test? Run the extended one and it will definitely show if the logic board, HD or HD fan is going out.
It will give you valid proof that something is wrong that the geniuses can't deny or fail to reproduce as well.
 
crazy long restore time

So, it turned out being that I needed a new hard drive. They even boosted me from a 500GB drive to a 650GB drive!

Eh, however, I'm doing a restore from my USB time machine backup and it reads that its going to be another....45 hours? Granted, it started at 68 hours, 90 minutes ago, but that still seems kind of insane doesn't it? I'm SO tempted to stop and see if restarting it will work but I'm being strong and resisting the urge.

What do you guys think? Normal backup time, or something else going on?
 
open ur mac, put a firework inside close it quickly, let it explode. take it out and clean it, take it to the applestore and say one day u were browsing the internet and u think u got a virus, and it started getting really hot and the fans were running really fast and loud, then it exploded and cut part of ur arm. btw u may have to cut urself if the thing doesnt do it for u. lol, just a suggestion to get a new for free.
 
Oh yeah, I should've listed some details...

It's about 150 GB of data that's transferring using a USB Seaquest drive. When I started my mac with the brand new drive, it had 10.5.8 installed. Heh, the best of my knowledge, it's not a USB 1.0 port. XD

It's been going all day but I'm not sure how long to go (I'm at work) but if it's still got another 27 hours to go, should I stop and try again? Or just exercise some patience?
 
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