Blue Screen, Spinning Cursor at shutdown

G

gbol

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I am running OS 10.1.5, (just upgraded) on a 450 Mhz G4. I am unable to shutdow or restart. When I try, I get a blue screen and a spinning cursor. The only way to get out of it is to turn the power off. I had the same problem in 10.1.4, but if I did a forced restart and did not open any applications I could shut down. Now it hangs here all the time. Any ideas out there?
 
Yes, I did that. It works once and then the problem is back. It doesn't seem like I should have to do this every time.
 
I've got a 700MHz G4 with 768 RAM, and sometimes when I log out from GUI, shut down, or log out from ">console" it gives me the beach ball and blue screen for as long as 3-5 minutes.

If you wait a while it might go away, mine works perfectly well. How long do you wait before hitting the power?
 
I let the machine run all night and it never went off. Something is causing damage to the disk, because I have to repair it everytime I use the computer in order to shut down.
 
:confused:
Hi i'm navigating through forums since 2 days(my install of OS 10.1.5) because i have exactly the same problems

last time my mac worked on os 10 was the restart just after the upgrade of10.1.5
after less than 2 min on this new version of the OS i just logged out !
and SURPRIZZE !!! blue screen (am i on a PC ? NO this blue is much more beautifull !(lol)).
the fact is that the mac was freezed on this blue screen hard disk was working (brrbrr noise) and just endless my only option was reset !!!
on next boot everything is normal untill the first window appear (the startup one with the blue bar on bottom like at every boot) but this time and everytime i try to boot on this 10.1.5 the textual indications(initializing network,...,etc...) doesn't appear and after the bar fill blue this window disappears(normal)
and same blue screen and pointer change from the rainbow circle-cdlike to normal and normal arrow and the HD is rebeginning this its noise and this endlessly
(sometimes, when i madly clik on keybord and mouse i can see rapidly a white text line that flashes on a completly black screen-->type of screen like in single user boot)but this just appear for less than 0.1s
and then blue screen again!! i can also not some different teint of blue sometimes (weird).

only solution is to rester or power shut down and norton, SOSdisk(OS 9) and singleuserboot -fsck command signal errors of Btree, VHB, VHB alt and repair these succesfully.but no successful boot on X after it.

NOTE that i had exactly the same problem after the OS10.1 upgrade and without solutions i just installed a completly new OSfrom 10.0.0.0.0.0
but i don't want to do this now so please APPLE PEOPLE HELP US
(after bugs of imovie , iphoto,etc we can see they are not grat in installer creations )
 
Zowie, those sound like bad problems. :(

Are these problems specific to OS X? In other words, does OS 9 behave normally? Is OS 9 installed on the same partition or HDD?

Just trying to isolate it to a software problem.

Sometimes the only thing that works is to do a low-level format of the HDD. You know, write zeroes all over everything.

That's sort of a drastic solution, though. You should probably wait until other, more experienced, people have responded to this.

Good luck! :)
 
yes os 9.2.2 is on a diff partition than os X
for me (i'm on it now)
there is no partitions or disk mapping problems
the problems seems to be in system files of OS X
if I knew how to rip of every user and try to reboot (i would perhaps have the first boot windows that ask to register the first admin user with address, etc, (you know,the one with a little QT video Hello,Bonjour,etc... at the beginning)

but what "pref" file do i have to delete in 10.1.5 (through os9)
to do that !
if it was a solution i could easily backup my user folders and keep my global system
and not have to lose time to reinstall all from 10 and the upgrade all and install all apps back and BRRRRRRrr.....
those some apple techisians comes in this forum sometimes ?
{
this is just to complicated for phone hotline and phone hotline operators are just poor unqualified people (at my experience) that just have a communication diplom to say "yes hello...wait please.... (and you wait endlessly like me on my blue screen)
}excuze me i'm full of rage because of all this !
 
i've got an AGP G4 450Mhz and am experience similar problems :( After the inital upgrade to 10.1.5, things seemed to work fine until the next reboot. Then I noticed an unsually long boot time and a stalled beach ball. After that I tried restarting and going into single user mode and running "/sbin/fsch -y". The problems got resolved however when I typed "exit" to leave single user mode it's just stale. The only remedy was to hit the restart button and run through the same procedure except typing "reboot" vs. "exit" after running "fsch". But, I'm still seeing lagged performance in some areas and everytime I boot into single user mode and run "/sbin/fsck -y" (just out of random habit) i'm still plagued with the SAME disk erros and only able to successfully exit single user mode by typing "reboot" vs "exit". any ideas?!
 
When you run fsck -y and get errors, do you reboot and repeat until you get no more errors? As in: boot into single-user mode, do fsck -y, it finds errors, so you type "reboot", go back into single-user mode, run fsck again, etc. That's the recommended thing, i believe.

And yes, I think one should reboot every time one runs fsck.
 
for me even after a fsck -y
i(t tells me errors are repaired and if i type fsck -y again no errors signaled
but the endless blue screen comes again
and the fact that remake some errors is the shutdown/reset from this point .
sniff:-(
 
Have you tried any 3rd party drive utilities, such as Norton or Drive10 or Techtools (or whatever Micromat is calling it these days)?

If an "advanced" utility like that isn't able to fix your problems (and I use the term advanced loosely--I don't trust Norton diskdoctor one bit), I'd say it's about time to think about backing up your data and zeroing your hard drive. That or just try a reinstall. I know which I'd do (zero!). I LOOOOOVE zeroing.

Godspeed, good knights! :p
 
Sign me up for the blue screen of death with the spinning cursor. I've had my Powerbook G4 667 512mb for almost 2 weeks now (5/25).
I recently did 3 upgrades since then. 10.1.3/4/and currently 5. This blue screen actually just happened last night.
I had to take out the battery, which I didnt want to do but it didnt shut down. I waited about 10-15 minutes thinking it would shut down, but it never did. I'm new to the Macworld, so any advice on what to do as far as checking my hard disk for damage or getting some type of software utility would be helpful.

Thanks...
 
And the spinning pizza of death happens every time, or just once?

Have you checked out Apple's discussion forums to see whether this is documented in other places? It might be some strange thing with 10.1.5. With so many people reporting this in this thread, that's what I'm beginning to suspect.

Zowie. I just checked out Apple's forum. Check out this thread to see how many other people :)eek: ) are having similar problems (although I didn't check to make sure that they were all shutdown-related).

I dunno, maybe reinstall and stick with 10.1.4 if that works for you. :(
 
cement - welcome to my real area of expertise - running repair and optimization programs:D

here's my opinion on them (having used them all) -

the best is diskwarrior at www.alsoft.com . it is a simple, fast, repair program that is safe to use - won't destroy everything if a power outage hits in the middle of it. The best deal is to order the cd and get Plus Optimizer along with it. this is a defragging app and again - it is fast, simple and safe. well, at least as fast as a good defragger can be.

next best is TechTool Pro from www.micromat.com . It is a bit more complex, considerably slower, but also safe. It has repair and defragging all in one app. It also has certain restricitions that hang it up at times - like not being able to complete a defrag if you have a file larger than biggest unused block. But if you like to know each detail of what it is doing, to control what tests you want to run, and to get a more detailed report of progress and results - then you might like this one better. I think the speed issue is the reason i don't use it more often.

both of these apps are curently only able to run in os 9 (not even classic and must be launched from and alternate boot disk like cd or external drive. but they do complete repairs on os x.

the only x native repair utility is Drive 10, also from alsoft, which works pretty well, at least for me. i have heard people complain about it, but not me. It is reasonably fast and safe, but must run from a seperate disk as well. nice, but at this point still not worth the investment in my opinion.

then there is norton from symantec. no link here because i tend to try and avoid lawsuits for handing out bad advice:D It's only advantage is speed. it is completely unsafe - having a reputation for taking down drives even without a power outage. It will also tell you something is fixed and then tell you the same thing is wrong again on a second examination right afterwards. always laugh to yourself when anybody claims that the other apps don't work and they know because norton found all these problems that no others would. (and people say this all the time!!!) honestly, avoid ths one like the plague.

I will only say that Diskwarrior saved one of my drives a while back that none of the others would. in fact, that was when i bought it and it has been my first choice ever since. and i can defrag an 80 gb drive in just a little longer than a good night's sleep with plus optimizer. and sleep soundly while i am doing it.:)
 
oh, i forgot to mention - i had the blue screen thing happen once so far in 10.1.5 . it happened a lot in 10.1.3 (along with kernal panics). But i just did a force restart and let the disk check run at startup and so far no repeats. i think i have rebooted 2, maybe 3 times since then. I have found it helps if you make sure you shut down all your apps first instead of letting the system do it for you. the time it happened i had left about a half dozen apps open during an install of QT or something that required a restart and forgot about them before choosing to restart.

I am normally a bit hesitant to run any 3rd party repair program immediately after an update unless i absolutely have to. It is always a good idea to run one before you update to make sure you aren't already corrupted. If neither alsoft nor micromat has an update out in a week or 2, i will assume they are safe as is and go back to using them (after checking their sites for warnings, that is)
 
My problem, (which started this whole thread), ended up being Norton Utilities. There were processes in the startup items folder that were not quitting, hence the hang. I uninstalled Norton Utilities and the problem went away.
 
so all that talk about norton causing more problems than it fixes wasn't just my personal ranting, eh?:D
 
Yup. It just reinforces my opinion that I won't trust Norton as I far as I can throw it.

Oops, I could probably throw a CD pretty far. :p I'd better rephrase: I wouldn't trust Peter Norton as far as I could throw him. ;) :p
 
I had this exact same problem a couple weeks back (although when I posted the issue, not one person replied :(. You managed to get 2 pages worth!).

It was Norton Utilities X, specifically, at least for me, the "DTDaemon" file in the Norton Support folder in the system library. When I deactivated Norton File Saver and trashed the DTDaemon file, everything worked fine after that.

To all using Norton...just don't.
 
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