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Freezing problem

M

mattw

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 13, 2007
17
0
I am hoping someone can help me with a problem that has developed lately. I will come back to my iBook G4 in the morning and more often than not now it will have frozen. The clock has stopped running at the time that it froze and when I try to open any applications from the dock the icon bounces around for a while and then it just gives up and stops bouncing.

If I hover the cursor around the top icons near the clock, it stays as an arrow until I get to the modem icon and from there and onwards the cursor changes to the little busy ball cursor.

I have tried repairing all permissions and checked the logs in console - system.log and console.log don't have anything in them at the time of the freeze. I'm not sure whether there are any others I can check or whether I can increase the logging level to make them more useful. I was hoping to either find the problem in a log or for it to give me a panic screen with some useful information.

Can anyone help me resolve this? Thanks..
 
I'll refresh my backup drive with superduper and then verify the drive as suggested - thank you.

If the system couldn't read/write to the drive would it not kernal panic to at least give me some information?
 
Well it all really depends on which component is having the troubles. Ideally the system will be able to log some sort of error, but it's not always possible if the system fails too quickly or in a more obscure way.
 
I managed to refresh my bootable backup drive, and ran a verify on the hard drive. It found a "minor error" in some kind of header on the drive. I booted off the install CDROM and repaired the drive. I also took the opportunity to run a hardware check and that found no errors.

I'll keep an eye on it and it the problem occurs I may be back for further advice :)

Thanks so far...
 
Unfortunately this is still causing a problem.

I came back to my iBook this morning and the clock was at 00:05. I didn't notice at first, started using Firefox and a new tab opened but it wouldn't actually connect to any pages. I would agree that the system appears to be able to use what is available in memory but perhaps not the hard drive.

Is there anything else I can do to try to gather any more information? Or any applications I can run to monitor hard disk availability? Or do I really just need to buy a new hard drive on the off chance that the problem lies there?

Thanks again :)
 
Yep, green light this time - no problems found.

Happened again last night at just after 3am. Doesn't appear to be a specific time. I have disabled my backup program which used to kick in at random times to backup.
 
Ahh this is pooh. Double check the logs again to see if they picked anything this time. What third party apps or hardware do you have running or installed? Keep Activity Monitor open in the background showing all tasks and try to check it before a freeze or when the computer starts acting strangely to see if it's any one process freezing or using up a lot of your resources. :)
 
Will do, thanks.

I don't have anything much running. Gmail notifier, mozy backup (with automatic backups suspended still at the moment) and thats about it.

I am getting other little weird problems where MSN Messenger is crashing when I close chat windows too. I'm tempted to just reinstall OSX but I would be a bit disappointed if I had to do that because I thought that was a windows only resolution.
 
I took your advice and left the activity monitor running. The freeze just happened again and SystemUIServer was showing in red as not responding.

I've done a little Google search and some people are suggesting icons in the bar at the top of the screen with the clock may be causing issues. I added the modem icon recently so I've remove that again and will continue to monitor!

The task manager was reporting a little bit of HDD I/O though which hopefully suggests it may not be hard disk failure.
 
10.4.10

No theme changers installed. My toolbar has the following:

Gmail notifier (calendar and mail)
Mozy backup
Airport
Bluetooth
Volume
Clock
Battery
Spotlight

All have been there some time though except the modem which is now gone.

No further crashes yet so will keep an eye on it...
 
I had that problem with MSN too and discovered it was caused by Safari 3 beta. Downloaded it again - used the uninstaller and all is fine now with MSN...
 
Yeah, MSN is buggy at the best of times but it really doesn't play nicely with Safari 3. If the freezing starts again, then remove a Menu Bar item, one at a time. :)
 
mad jew said:
Yeah, MSN is buggy at the best of times but it really doesn't play nicely with Safari 3. If the freezing starts again, then remove a Menu Bar item, one at a time. :)
Click to expand...


Okay, wow. I thought protected memory spaces were supposed to eliminate this kind of stuff!
 
I thought for reference sake I would post the resolution to this - Mac OS rebuild! I tried various combinations of running applications and tray icons with no luck and in the end a rebuild only took an hour or so and has left me with a much cleaner machine.

Freezing problem has now disappeared.
 
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