Snow Leopard - Freezes randomly

[szhrmp]

Did an upgrade install from 10.5.8 to SL (MacPro early 2008, 8800 Nvidia).

Didn't use the Mac for a couple of hours - when I came back I had a black screen and no way of reviving Mac (only forced shutdown via power button). this happened twice. Did never have a problem previously.

Is there a way to find out why this happens?

 

[lamina]

I'd say it's because Snow Leopard.0 is pretty damn buggy.

I suggest you back up your stuff and reinstall on a formatted drive.

Although I'm having some real issues with Snow Leopard, and I did a clean install. Can't wait for that .1 update.

 

[Lopez]

I had the same problem on a 13" aluminum mac book (the late-2008 version). So I did a clean install and it still randomly froze as soon as 10.6 finished installing (this is without ANY additional apps other than what is installed by default).

Also, the computer wouldn't go to sleep (screen would go off but the machine wouldn't actually power down) and I also couldn't shut it down - as soon as the power went off it would re-start and the only way I could get it to stay off was to pull out the battery.

So, I've reverted to 10.5 for now (on the same drive - had to re-format) but the machine is stable again.

 

[crazyxzer0]

I had the same problem on a 13" aluminum mac book (the late-2008 version). So I did a clean install and it still randomly froze as soon as 10.6 finished installing (this is without ANY additional apps other than what is installed by default).

Also, the computer wouldn't go to sleep (screen would go off but the machine wouldn't actually power down) and I also couldn't shut it down - as soon as the power went off it would re-start and the only way I could get it to stay off was to pull out the battery.

So, I've reverted to 10.5 for now (on the same drive - had to re-format) but the machine is stable again.

same here. sometimes it doesnt sleep and i am driving 50miles with it in my backpack to only open it up seeing a dead battery from the fan going nuts in the backpack...




hopefully 10.6.1 comes outs soon to fix the bugs

 

[HaroldSjursen]

Snow Leopard freezes randomly -- it's like having Windows again

I am having this problem as well. I have all my docs, pix, data, etc., backed up on an external drive but not my aps some of which were downloaded so I don't have media. I don't really want to try to copy them and then format and reinstall Snow Leopard. But this freezing/deep sleep problem is quite annoying. I became a Mac user years back to avoid the frequent crashes I was having with Windows. Now I seem to have it with Mac! I went to Snow Leopard because the advance reviews said it was cleaner and smaller and therefore faster than 10.5. I feel I have have been cheated. Has Apple acknowledged this problem and is a fix in the works? In the meantime, any suggestions?

 

[Lopez]

I would wait. In my case the clean install didn't solve either problem. Going back to 10.5 did.

 

[Lopez]

OK - to be fair, it's working now. By "clean install" I guess I was thinking in XP terms since you need an existing OS to use an upgrade disc - my clean install involved wiping my HD, installing the OS and apps that came with it, and then running the Snow Leopard install. It occurred to me that I could probably just install Snow Leopard onto a blank hard drive, so I tried that and then used migration assistant to bring over my apps/settings/data from a time machine backup. This appears to have worked (it doesn't crash any more).


...but I still can't put my machine to sleep. It goes to sleep and immediately wakes up again by itself. This is really annoying. But at least the OS doesn't crash.

 

[szhrmp]

I figured finally out why my SL was crashing - turns out my VirusBarrier X5 10.5 (latest version) caused a kernel panic every 10 hours or so (apparently VB is compatible with Snow Leopard). After uninstallation of this sh... everything works fine.

The way I figured it out: the kernel panic logs are in /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports. The kernel logs had something like this:

....

System uptime in nanoseconds: 18183819522719
unloaded kexts:
com.apple.driver.AppleFileSystemDriver 2.0 (addr 0x9155d000, size 0x12288) - last unloaded 156552000403
loaded kexts:
com.intego.iokit.VirusBarrierService 10.5.9 - last loaded 44554002773
...
...