Whoa. What the hell happened here?

[ravenvii]

I was innocently working on the Mac, tweaking a presentation in Keynote. I decided to insert the Software Install CD that came with the mini so I could install GarageBand, for the presentation. Right after I inserted the CD, everything went straight to hell! Every single tiny action takes a full minute or two to perform - simply clicking on a menubar item (in this case, File in Keynote because I wanted to save the presentation before things went even deeper into hell). I managed to save the presentation about like, 5 minutes of clicking File then Save, and alots of beachball wheels. I went to restart after successfully saving and quitting Keynote for good measure (which is insanely slow and beachball-filled). And the restart itself was shot to hell too - an incredibly long beachballing, then the elements of the Finder goes away leaving the wallpaper there. I waited and waited for the machine to actually restart, and finally gave up and hard-reset it. It's fine now, and the CD mounted with no problems after restart.

It's like when I inserted the CD, the CD chokeslammed the mini right through the mat. Total KO!

What the hell just happened!?!

 

[redAPPLE]

ever tried repairing the permissions?

 

[ravenvii]

Heh, I knew I should've mentioned that I updated to 10.3.9 yesterday, and thus repaired permissions right after I restarted.

EDIT: Just wanted to say this isn't a "problem" per se, it's working perfectly now after the hard reboot, but I'm just wondering what the hell just happened here. Does reading a DVD tax the Finder/OS THAT much?

 

[Mechcozmo]

Does reading a DVD tax the Finder/OS THAT much?

If the disk has an error and fails to mount, it can.

See, OS X runs a quick check on a disk to see if it can be read from or written to. If the disk is then ejected forcefully (not via software, like what happens when you press the eject key) then sometimes the disk check will fail, hogging your CPU power.

I learned that with a floppy disk ejection gone bad...

 

[Marble]

Sounds like the CD's gone bad. I recently burned a lot of info to some really cheap CDs, and several of them are already unreadable. When I insert the CDs with bad parts (especially if the bad part is near the beginning) then my Powerbook's drive spins like a hoover and the OS has a panic attack for a while. Usually it settles down after a lot of huffing and puffing, though. The CD just fails to mount.

 

[Mechcozmo]

Sounds like the CD's gone bad. I recently burned a lot of info to some really cheap CDs, and several of them are already unreadable. When I insert the CDs with bad parts (especially if the bad part is near the beginning) then my Powerbook's drive spins like a hoover and the OS has a panic attack for a while. Usually it settles down after a lot of huffing and puffing, though. The CD just fails to mount.

Except for the fact that the CD mounted fine after a restart....

 

[James Philp]

I love this post, it really highlights how rare an event like this is!
If this had happened to you on a PC, you probably wouldn't have thought twice, and slammed down that reset button (on the front! )
I don't know what may have happened, are you on a network, maybe putting in a drive upset a remote user? Hmm, strange. At least nothing is lost, oh the times i lost paragraphs in word on the PC...

Most crashes I had like this were to do with hardware drives & networking combined. Not the same as you seem to describe though. Hope all is good now!

 

[mad jew]

Talking of PCs, Norton Antivirus used to be set up to scan all inserted disks and this'd slow my system down heaps and heaps if I was running something big like VPC at the same time.