eMac freezing

[lewis.winders]

My 5yo eMac (1GHz G4 with 1GB of RAM) freezes intermittently. Sometimes the mouse & keyboard lock up, sometimes a semi-opaque grey 'curtain' covers the screen with a message window in the middle telling me to restart.
Sometimes it restarts okay, sometimes it freezes on the Apple/cog-wheel screen, sometimes the grey curtain comes down again, sometimes the desktop loads okay but then lines of code scroll down the left side of the screen and it locks up again. The RAM is third-party stuff but it's been working fine for over 12 months. The freezing occurs under 10.4 and 10.3.

 

[Sun Baked]

Need to look at the console.app and look at the logs to see what it is saying for the Kernel Panics and in the general logs at the top during freeze time.

 

[lewis.winders]

Thanks for the prompt reply. I've printed out the most recent few pages of console.log and panic.log, but it's all pretty much meaningless to me. What should I be looking for?

 

[Sun Baked]

Go down the list right before each restart to see what the machine was doing when it crashed.

The all all messages, console messages, system.log, panic reporter, hang reporter, and also looking at the kernel panics usually might help to pinpoint an app hanging the machine.

Restarts look a lot like the single user boot page.

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However if it was simply freezing the machine and the mouse and clock stopped, that is one indicator of the drive going bad ... doesn't have time to write any crash or kernel panic.

Yours kernel panics so it might simply be a software problem with the file system.

Checking permissions (run from the hard drive since, the dvd doesn't have the most recent updates) and running fsck or disk first aid from the DVD might find some file/system catalog errors hanging the machine.

 

[lewis.winders]

Thanks again, that gives me something to go on with.