My first G5 crash... I think?

[Cohiba]

Greetings all - thanks in advance your your feeedback.

I've had my G5 for 3 months now. Its fantastic (my 1st Mac)!! On to the problem. I recently downloaded konfabulator (calender & weather), and had it running for a few days. Last night when I put my G5 on "sleep" it seemed normal untill the fans started blowing like I've never heard them go before, I have to imagine the RPM's were at max. I immediately shut down, and restarted, when I restarted my entourage it had to be re-setup (like the first time). Also, all my songs are on the HD still, but not in iTunes... These were the 2 things I noticed (I had to get off to work)...

Thoughts, comments, ideas...

 

[wrldwzrd89]

Greetings all - thanks in advance your your feeedback.

I've had my G5 for 3 months now. Its fantastic (my 1st Mac)!! On to the problem. I recently downloaded konfabulator (calender & weather), and had it running for a few days. Last night when I put my G5 on "sleep" it seemed normal untill the fans started blowing like I've never heard them go before, I have to imagine the RPM's were at max. I immediately shut down, and restarted, when I restarted my entourage it had to be re-setup (like the first time). Also, all my songs are on the HD still, but not in iTunes... These were the 2 things I noticed (I had to get off to work)...

Thoughts, comments, ideas...

You must have had Entourage and iTunes open at the time the fans came on at maximum speed for this to happen. When you shut down the G5, your Entourage user data and iTunes library became corrupted somehow, so that when you restarted, it reverted to the initial configuration because the existing settings were not valid. As far as the fans speeding up to max goes, I strongly suspect that the G5 simply reverted to fast mode because the fan control program in Mac OS X stopped running for some reason. If I were you, I'd check for relevant updates (there is a fan update for the G5s, by the way), install them, and report back.

 

[Cohiba]

Where can I get the fan update? I selected software update from from little blue apple icon, but nothing about fan updates?

Thanks again!

 

[wrldwzrd89]

Where can I get the fan update? I selected software update from from little blue apple icon, but nothing about fan updates?

Thanks again!

Look here, and check your list of installed updates in Software Update to make sure you don't have it already. Make sure that you pick up the firmware update for the single-processor PowerMac G5s if your 1.8 has only one CPU.

 

[Makosuke]

Last night when I put my G5 on "sleep" it seemed normal untill the fans started blowing like I've never heard them go before, I have to imagine the RPM's were at max.

That's the standard "crash" mode for the G5's fans; whenever the fan controller loses contact with the OS (the OS freezes, kernel panics, or otherwise crashes), it cranks all the fans up to full blast, to make sure nothing overheats (since it's not getting a proper signal based on the temperatures). It's frighteningly loud, but normal (or at least as normal as any OS crash).

As for ways to keep it from happening again, can't help you. Making sure Software Update says you're up to date is always good, and checking for other people reporting crashes related to the software you use (I've heard unkind things about Konfabulator on occasion).

I'm assuming you were running a version of 10.3, but on the off chance your G5 is running 10.2.8, it's entirely possible that you ran out of hard drive space. My logic: When the startup drive is completely full, bad things can happen, including crashes. An additional side-effect is that currently open files often get corrupted--iTunes' database and Entourage sound like prime candiditates. Add that to the fact that Konfabulator apparently can use a LOT of RAM, and it's possible it slowly ate your available memory and then started filling up the disk with swap files. Eventually, no space left, and toast. There'd be no indication of that now, since the swap files are deleted on restart. 10.3.x *should* give you a warning when something like this is happening ("free space low" or something), but 10.2.x didn't, and I've had bad things happen as a result.

Just random guessing, but worth thinking about.

 

[Rocksaurus]

stay awake

I've heard of this (minus the corrupted files) happening to most G5's when you put them to "sleep"... Sleep in OS X really does little in the way of power conservation, OS 9 did much more... Anyway, due to the reports of this happening on other G5's I've NEVER put my G5 to sleep... and never had a problem like this. Over a year of ownership and not one kernel panic (I don't even know what they look like yet!) I've also never had my fans get loud, even on highest setting, but that's likely because I'm using a G5 1.6... Still fast enough for me though, so no complaints. In conclusion, instead of putting your computer to sleep, you should fold.
http://folding.stanford.edu/
team 3446 (MacRumors Team)

 

[Cohiba]

Thanks for the feedback!

As always the Mac community has been very helpful.

Now - what would you reccomend for data backup? I'll need to back up entourage emails/address', word & excel doc's & iTunes...

I'd like something intuitive & simple, but I dont mind learning an application if it presents advantages over most others.

Thanks

 

[yellow]

As always the Mac community has been very helpful.

Now - what would you reccomend for data backup? I'll need to back up entourage emails/address', word & excel doc's & iTunes...

I'd like something intuitive & simple, but I dont mind learning an application if it presents advantages over most others.

Thanks

Anyone who wants to reply to this, should probably do it here:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/90208/