Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Mac OS X Dead

G

GrandMan

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 6, 2004
23
0
Hey everyone,

Over time my iMac G5 has become slower and slower on start up, as well as being unable to repair disk permissions without hanging, install apps with VISE X installers which search the drive without hanging, and generally being slow.

I recently installed Cocktail, did some tweaking here and there, rand the pilot - it hung on doing one of the cron tasks. Force quit the application, the got on with my doings. Thought that maybe Cocktail could repair the disk permissions better - tried it - computer hung - had to restart with the power button.

Booted up and nothing works. It boots up fully, but as soon as you try and do something, such as open an app, it will hang, sometimes coming back to life for a couple of seconds, only to hand once more.

So, booted up into single user mode and ran fsck -f as recommended in a post on the boards. It got up to "Checking Catalog file" then said

disk0s3: I/O error
Invalid Record count
(4, 659)
**Volume check failed.

Tried it a couple of times, always did the same thing except once it said "Invalid node structure" instead of record count.

I then booted up in verbose mode.Everything runs smootly until it conects to the Airport, then 4 "disk0s3: I/O timeout" errors follow. The computer then boots into OS X, then does as said above.

I've tried tools such as disk warrior in the past, to no avail. There is alot of important data on the computer that I need to retrieve, what is the best way to do this? Then, should I format and reinstall Tiger?

Thank in advance (and thanks for reading :))

Laurence
 
GrandMan said:
Then, should I format and reinstall Tiger?

Thank in advance (and thanks for reading :))

Laurence
Click to expand...

If you have another Mac, try booting with the iMac in FireWire target disk mode to see if you can get your data off safely. Reinstalling Tiger is probably the only way to get things functioning correctly.
 
GrandMan said:
I've tried tools such as disk warrior in the past, to no avail. There is alot of important data on the computer that I need to retrieve, what is the best way to do this? Then, should I format and reinstall Tiger?
Click to expand...

You should have already backed up your data! Do it now!

If you've tried disk utilities to no avail, then a format and reinstall might be required. Because of the rarity of such problems actually being strictly software-related these days leads me to suspect a possible hardware problem. If there is any funny business after the format and reinstall, you should contact Applecare and inform them of the situation.
 
yeah i thnk the best thing to do.. as the previous poster said is... back up your stuff asap. then try t run off a different drive.. sounds like your drive is failing... and quickly.

oh and if you try to reformat make sure you zero it out... that tends to help out a bit.
 
When you run Disk Warrior on the drive, what happens? Does it report disk damage that cannot be repaired?

I agree with the other posters -- get your data off that drive ASAP. If the drive itself isn't failing mechanically, then at the very least it's damaged and will probably need to be reformatted. You might want to try to clone your drive to an external so that you can clone it back to either the reformatted drive or a new one.
 
Yes, it does sound like your hard drive is failing. It's only going to get worse so waste no time and get an external drive (since you are on an iMac) and backup all your important stuff onto it. Hopefully you'll be able to retrieve everything.
 
And don't EVER put cocktail on that Machine again. Isntead use DiskWarrior and TechTool Pro, and Macaronie. Cocktail is one of the worst effing apps you cna install. Not only is it bloated but it's just a wrapper for applescripts/unix scripts that you can do yourself or with the aid of Macaronie (which actually schedules through the system and isn't a bunch of crappy scripts).
 
Thanks for the help all. When I ran Diskwarrior in the past it always hang when analyzing the drive.

The iMac seems to now be able to boot up, hang for 10 minutes then work for a while. I will try and back up as much as needed, then format and reinstall Tiger.

Could someone quickly tell me how to format with all 0's as someone suggested?
 
When you go to initialize the drive in Disk Utilities you'll see an options or advanced button. Click that and check the box that says write zero's. I'll warn you, I did that with an imac G4 and it took hours to complete.

With this G4 iMac it would boot and run okay. Then out of nowhere the machine would just crash with the "reset" message coming up. It seemed completely at random. I could work on it 5 minutes or 2 hours in any app.

I thought it was Kernal errors or Ram errors. So I ran memtest a bunch of times and also reinstalled OS X. Also checked everything through Techtools as well. Still kept crashing. That's when I did the zero hard drive option and after that was done the SMART finally read a failed message. Which was weird because the verify disk and permission checks said the drive was okay.

After replacing the drive the machine works 100%.
 
Isn't there a way to do it in single user mode? I don't think the computer will stay alive long enough to do it in OS X :(
 
GrandMan said:
Thanks for the help all. When I ran Diskwarrior in the past it always hang when analyzing the drive.
Click to expand...

Are you sure it hangs? Disk Warrior can take a long long time to do its job. It's like watching paint dry. It's best run from the CD or from another Mac via Target Disk Mode. Also helps to have the latest version.
 
Onizuka said:
And don't EVER put cocktail on that Machine again. Isntead use DiskWarrior and TechTool Pro, and Macaronie. Cocktail is one of the worst effing apps you cna install. Not only is it bloated but it's just a wrapper for applescripts/unix scripts that you can do yourself or with the aid of Macaronie (which actually schedules through the system and isn't a bunch of crappy scripts).
Click to expand...
You realise that Macaroni's main purpose (running periodic scripts that didn't run because the machine wasn't on when they were supposed to) is rendered obsolete with Tiger and launchd right? Now if a script was supposed to be run at midnight, it will be run at the next earliest possible time instead, unlike in previous versions of OS X.

Also there's nothing particularly wrong with Cocktail, and it certainly won't have hurt his machine.
 
dr_lha said:
You realise that Macaroni's main purpose (running periodic scripts that didn't run because the machine wasn't on when they were supposed to) is rendered obsolete with Tiger and launchd right? Now if a script was supposed to be run at midnight, it will be run at the next earliest possible time instead, unlike in previous versions of OS X.

Also there's nothing particularly wrong with Cocktail, and it certainly won't have hurt his machine.
Click to expand...


Read this:
http://rixstep.com/4/2/cocktail,01.shtml
 
dr_lha said:
You realise that Macaroni's main purpose (running periodic scripts that didn't run because the machine wasn't on when they were supposed to) is rendered obsolete with Tiger
Click to expand...

Hi dr-lha ..

That's interesting ... do you have any documentation for that?

One other good thing that Macaroni does is repair permissions on a weekly basis ... and remove language files regularly if scheduled.
 
IJ Reilly said:
I have absolutely no idea what this person is going on about. As nearly as I can tell, it's all a bunch of code monkey macho.
Click to expand...

Looks like he's just one of those freeware purists who's pissed off that Cocktail went shareware.

I've used cocktail for a long time and never had any problems.
 
dr_lha said:
So it takes up disk space and can all be done on the command line? So f***ing what? Not everyone cares about a small amount of lost disk space, and certainly most are not interesting in learning the ins-and-outs of Unix to do what this tool does with a click of the mouse.
Click to expand...

Oh come on, all any program is is typing!!! And we can all type, right? Why are we paying these people to type for us?????

No-one should buy software, they should write their own apps if they want to do something with the computer. So what if it takes them ages??? Their time is not important, right!? [As someone else on this forum said... I don't believe I just wasted the last 45 seconds of my life reading that guy's inane drivel Ed]
 
Please stop with the flaming.

Obviously we're all divided here, with one group liking Cocktail, another disliking Cocktail and going with a more-free solution, and another eschewing apps in favor of the (simpler and easier) command line style.

Big deal. This is why OS X is so great. If you like one particular style over another, go ahead and use it. But, the barebones command line stuff is still there if you prefer them.

I'm a fan of the not-paying-for-applications-that-do-things-i-know-how-to-do-in-terminal-because-it's-faster-to-do-it-without-the-fancy-gui group, but there are people who have no idea wtf to do or even know that that exists, or would rather not muck around with that...and that's fine with me..whatever floats your boat.
 
dr_lha said:
So it takes up disk space and can all be done on the command line? So f***ing what? Not everyone cares about a small amount of lost disk space, and certainly most are not interesting in learning the ins-and-outs of Unix to do what this tool does with a click of the mouse.
Click to expand...



No man you got it all wrong! Terminal is the way to go! Screw apps like Cocktail and iLife! I run all my music/burn dvd's/and edit movies all in terminal too! Why pay Apple to do it for us when we can type it all out ourselves!?


/Mega sarcasm fyi


GrandMan said:
Formatted with 0's and reinstalled - runs like a dream! Thanks all :)
Click to expand...

Good to hear! Hope it stays that way.
 
Stridder44 said:
No man you got it all wrong! Terminal is the way to go! Screw apps like Cocktail and iLife! I run all my music/burn dvd's/and edit movies all in terminal too! Why pay Apple to do it for us when we can type it all out ourselves!?
Click to expand...
I am removing OS X right now and replacing it with a text-mode only cut down version of Darwin 7.0 right now. ;)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back