More problems

[zippygaloo]

I'm having even more problems now. See if you can figure out what's causing this.

I boot OSX everthing seems to work fine, but then all of a sudden (and everytime I use my computer I might add) my mouse freezes on the screen and I loose control of it and then the hard drive starts crunching. SOMETIMES I REGAIN CONTROL OF MY MOUSE (SO THIS IS NOT A CRASH), but most of the time I don't. I notice that each time I don't regain control, the light in the mouse (optical lazer) goes out and I loose control of everything (including the keyboard). I can't quit, force quit, i can't do anything. This happens in OS9.1 as well. I can't do anything but give it a hard restart. This can't be good for my computer. This one is really boggling me as most of the time I can figure out where the problem lies.

400 Mhz G4 Tower (Sawtooth)
576MB RAM
20 Gig HD
17" Studio Display (ADC)
Earthlink/Mindspring/DSL

[avalenz]

It almost sounds as if the hard drive is failing, especially if you say this problems happens both in OS 9.1 and OS X. Try reinstalling both systems and see if that solves your problem. If it doesn't, try reformatting your HD and then doing a clean reinstall (painful, I know). If that STILL doesn't solve anything and you continue to hear HD thrashing, I'd take your mac to an apple authorized service center (or whatever they're called) and have them take a look at the HD.

Good luck.

-Ali

[scott]

By "crunching" do you mean your HD is constantly reading / writing? If so, I have seen this to be a couple of things:

1) Your hd needs to be formatted, either a "Zero All Data" or a low level format. Take the time to do one of the options as a straight init. basically only removes the directory structure (i think)

That has solved it for me on an older SCSI drive...

2) In a case where that didn't work, you could have a bad HD or some bad i/o component.

Maybe your problem is elsewhere, if you are losing power to your devices , i.e. your mouse?



Scott