10.2 freezing - or is it me?

karavite

karavite

Registered
I was trying to ignore it, but it has happened 5 times now and nothing but my OS version has changed for a while.

10.2 has frozen up on my system requiring me to use the restart button that has seen so little action for the past year. The spinning wheel of death appears and I cannot quit or switch to anything else or even do a force quit since it seems it is the finder itself that is frozen. It seems my only option is the restart button. This has happened at different times, but it seems to occur when my system has sat there for while and has a few apps open (Mail, IE, a finder window or two and Windows Media player with some radio station playing) - I do not have energy saving or sleep options on.

In addition, I have one thing that is a little unorthodox, but it was never a problem before and I'm hoping it is not now. I boot off an external 80 GB firewire drive (I have 2 internals at 20 GB, but I wanted at least a 30 GB partition to boot from - please don't give me options for having my user files on another partition - I just want a simple life if I can have it). When the system freezes and I push the restart button the system will not boot up - I get a plain grey screen that just sits there. I need to shut down the external drive's power, start it back up, then start the computer. It seems to really take its time starting up after this, but I am assuming OS X is dealing with the fact that the machine was not properly shut down.

I can't say if I ever had to do this with 10.1.3, 4 or 5 BECAUSE THEY NEVER EVER FROZE! Any advice, opinions, similar experience? What are the odds this is a 10.2 issue and not a problem with my drive?

P.S. G4 450 with 1 GB ram.
 
Did you choose the "upgrade" path to 10.2 from 10.1.5? I did, and experienced NUMEROUS kernel panics, and when I wasn't experiencing those, I was experiencing Finder freezes. Only the Finder, though, and it happened at random times. However, one thing remained the same: any time anything tried to access anything on one of my hard drives connected to my Sonnet Tempo ATA/100 PCI card, the Finder would freeze requiring a hard restart. Also, I could not copy anything to or from my system disk. Weird. I formatted, wiped, started over, and reinstalled 10.2 from scratch. This thing is ROCK solid now.

I recommend staying away from the "upgrade" option. It caused me problems twice. I'm sure numerous people have had tremendous luck with it, but I highly recommend a reformat and scratch install.
 
Well, good to hear I am not alone!

This isn't fair. I have sooooooooo many things set up the way I like them and I don't really need or want more "quality time" with all my applications, files, directories, preferences, X install, ... you name it, we are talking about hours and hours if not days of work.

Any chance a 10.2.1 upgrade or something will cure my ills? I just don't want to do this now or ever!

How about prebinding? Anything but a clean install! I thought that was all behind me...
 
7 hours later...

Okay, I did a clean install on a new partition, copied all my files, reinstalled the apps I needed to, reset preferences... everything but reinstall fink X Darwin, all my perl libraries, apache settings... maybe another 7 hours of work.

Ugh - I hope this pays off! Thanks for your suggestion - I just meakly assumed Apple would do us all right on this one and that the upgrade would work.
 
Hmmm... I'm assuming our problems stem from the fact that you and I like to customize our OS X installations, and perhaps the upgrade path assumes that you're simply a normal user and don't muck around with too much UNIX stuff... when it tries to upgrade something we've changed, well, problems arise. I'm assuming my Finder freeze from disk read/writes stems from the fact that I've installed hacked versions of the Sonnet Tempo ATA/100 drivers to enable deep sleep mode and what-not... I dunno, but a fresh, clean install proved to be worth the extra work!
 
That makes sense, but I am hardly the most savvy or daring OS X user out there! I thought installing X with fink left the system alone - everything was in the /sw directory and one little line to my path? My explorations into perl and apache are really quite amatuerish - I only did enough to run a few simple scripts locally.

I guess I was spoiled by all the other OS X upgrades, but with 10.2 being a bit more dramatic, I guess I can understand this.
 
I did a clean install the day that jaguar came and it has frozen twice in the past week. I was wondering if anyone else has had the same problem. I don't want is causing it, but I hope that apple figures it out soon.
 
I did a clean install the day that jaguar came and it has frozen twice in the past week. I was wondering if anyone else has had the same problem. I don't want is causing it, but I hope that apple figures it out soon.
Click to expand...

Oh man, where were you yesterday! :) This is not good. I'll let you know if my new fresh and clean install starts to crash too. When you say clean, do you mean on a completely newly formatted drive? Any particular applications or unusual circumstances to your freezes? I really didn't see a pattern in mine other than it seemed to happen when the computer was left alone for long stretches of time (a few hours).
 
Guess what - fresh install on a new drive partition and I have experienced three finder freezes in a week, though one was just the cursor freezing (still had keyboard access, but didn't set up my keyboard shortcuts yet).

I find it hard to believe a computer that never ever froze with OS X 10 - 10.1.5 is suddenly freezing once a day. I'm just hoping an update 10.2.1? will solve this.

Any body have ideas?
 
Same here....

Jag install on G4 500 Dual. Archive and Install (keep Home etc). Seemed to be fine. But MS Entourage (email) kept asking for passwords. Then .Mac preference pane would forget the passwords too. And clicking any Authenticating locks in Preferences wasn’t working. It worked a few times – then stopped.

Turns out the keychain had locked itself randomly. Open Keychain app and click unlock – no go. Useless. Log out – OS X drops out to the Console – very scary.

Force restart – or “Sudo reboot”.

Everything fine. Until I go online and use email....

So I reinstalled with Archive again. Still same. Then replaced my Keychain (backed it up, then deleted it and tried that). Same problems.

So I made a new Admin user. Moved all my files over – took ages to sort out all the permission problems that come from that – had to burn CDs of most of it then copy them back to the new user. Deleted the old user.

This means a fresh Admin user for me....

Keychain hadn’t gone wrong for a whole day....

Then it started playing up again.

I reinstalled Office X. And that’s where I’m up to now.

Overall Jaguar is ace. But weird problems have been occurring randomly. Adobe InDesign stopped having Undo’s. No reason. A restart fixed it. I can’t find anything wrong with the system.

The keychain problem hasn’t occurred today and I’ve been trying to make it happen. So.... I can only hope I’ve fixed it.

In 10.1.5 I had no problems at all. Everything just worked – all day long. Whatever I could try to do it would never go wrong – nothing ever (except Sleep – which works in Jaguar!!). Jaguar so far isn’t as reliable. Except Jaguar is MUCH faster – I love the speed. InDesign is noticeably faster, as is Photoshop and the Finder...


Seems I’m not alone with jaguar problems. I also have all my apps set up how I like them – and don’t want to erase my drive. It’s very very clean at the moment – I’ve backed up everything and defragged so erasing wouldn’t take too long (5 hours ish??) – but since others who have put in the time still have problems I might just wait until 10.2.1. I suggest everyone do the following and watch out for problems if the little Keychain lock icon locks itself.....

Go to: Applications > Utilities > Keychain Access

Then go to View Menu and select > Show Status in Menu Bar.

I hope these problems go away! Restarting every now and then isn’t too bad – it only takes 30 seconds now so it’s ok. But we’ve got so used to no problems with 10.1.5 that it’s unacceptable!!!
 
Since I had 90 days of tech support on Jaguar I called Apple - he suggested I try using an Apple mouse and keyboard as well as pull various memory chips to see if the problem goes away. Despite the fact that I have used my Macally keyboard and logitech 2 button cordless mouse for two years and they never needed a driver and that my latest memory chip was installed 2 months before I upgraded to 10.2, they seemed to not accept the idea that 10.2 could be at fault for my freezes and said he had no open issues or reports. I don't buy this line and I'm not going to waste my time and go nuts trying to isolate a non-existent hardware issue that just happened to appear the same week I upgraded to 10.2

If anyone else is having freezes, please call Apple - you have 90 days support with your Jaguar purchase. After a few people call, lets do an experiment and see if they still say nobody has reported freezes!

It only hoses once every day or two, but I sure do really miss my crash proof Mac. I feel like I have been let down by an old friend.
 
Just got a new Mac (DP 1 GIG) and it ONLY experices finder freezes when I have my three month old GVP External 80 GB firewire drive attached - and not all the time. Since I only use this for backups, I can live with it, but I never had crashes with this drive on my G4 450 running 10.1.5. Sounds like some kind of 10.2 and 10.2.1 bug to me.
 
I am having constant freezes while using web browsers, I've tried NS, IE, Opera, OmniWeb and whatever else i could find. It seems however that it only occurs when I am scrolling or dragging something. I have a Microsoft IntelliMouse, so i am thinking that may be the problem.
 
Originally posted by karavite


I find it hard to believe a computer that never ever froze with OS X 10 - 10.1.5 is suddenly freezing once a day. I'm just hoping an update 10.2.1? will solve this.
Click to expand...

My computer has never crashed since I upgraded to 10.1.5...
..and before that, the only application that crashed the system was the Apple DVD player.
 
Well be careful with 10.2 unless you use only Apple input devices, are sure your memory is perfect and don't use firewire drives. People with any of those things seem to have issues with freezing - I had them all on my G4 450, but only the keyboard mouse and firwire drive with the DP 1 GHz which never freezes unless the firewire drive is plugged in.

Could it be as stupid as a bad firewire cable?
 
jeffreysambells, i have the same problem with my "Microsoft IntelliMouse".
it was fine before 10.2
 
I doubt this is going to help you guys as you have already done clean installs and all but I will toss it in.

I was experiencing Finder lock ups along with the following symptoms, using Go to server to connect to a win box would just hang forever, force did nothing either from the keyboard or selecting from the menu. Same with restart and logout.

I threw away all the apple.com plist files and rebooted. Actually I think I saved the dock preference. OSX rebuilt the deleted pref files and everything was back to normal. Maybe there is some bug in Jaguar that is corrupting these pref files. I have to say I didn't loose any settings doing this, not even network settings.

If it happens again I am going to track down exactly which plist file is the problem. I didn't have the time this go around.

Worth a shot. I hope it helps.
 
Hi folks,

yesterday while playing TacOps with my Microsoft IntellyMouse the Systems freezes. Try to suspend the program and got a dialog saying i have to press the reset button.

This happend twice in the game and a few minutes later while workung in the Finder.

The Systemprofiler Logbookentry shows 2 kernel panics due to problems in the com.apple.iokit.IOATAFamily(1.5.2f1)@0x284d8000 module or whatever this means.

After rebooting my Systemdrive was not found the first time. Booting from 10.2 SystemCD and run FirstAid.

After the second restart my hole HDD was not found. Even when try FirstAid again from CD the HDD/Volume was not listed.

First thought my harddisk has headcrashed or something like this but after restarting again all's ok now since 24 hours.
 
I have the same problem.

Since installing 10.2 and 10.2.1 as clean installs, getting frequent freezes. I will try and unplug the Firewire drive and see if that helps, but this looks more system related than hardware related, since everyone seems to have a different system, and you are all experiencing the same problems.

What with .Mac crashing and the system freezing....Very frustrating. Perfectly stable under 10.1.5.

Hope Apple sorts this out quickly.

Andrew
 
Andrewhicks,

I called GVP (MacMall) with the idea that they would be interested in this problem with my firewire drive, but they decided to give me a new and different brand drive (EZQuest). Though I am not one for conspiracy theories, I wondered if they knew of some issue and just decided to swap drives for anyone who calls. I mean, the guy didn't even want to consider my 10.1.5 to 10.2 observations - he said it was probably a coincidence!

I'll let you know how the new drive works out.
 
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