jaguar crash proof or spoof?

S

shemina

Registered
I heard so many great things about the new jaguar OS that when I decided my old 266iMac was outdated I bought a new flat panel 15" iMac sporting this fancy new crach proof OS. But to my dismay and sometimes horror, my computer keeps experiencing full fledged system crashes. I just don't know what is wrong. I thought someone might have an idea.

I've increased my ram to 640 but i haven't updated the OS because the day we brought this baby home the automatic update caused the system to crash. This was followed by the mysterious blue screen problem. After spending an hour or two on the phone with the help line we got her back up and running (they denied the problem existed for the first hour even though the hold recording made reference to it?)

Now i am experiences system crashes when playing my only game ghost recon and also while running the free version of real audio (i think a beta verrsion). I think in the last 2 days i've had 4 crashes.

Any ideas?
 
Does your game and real audio crash your whole system? Does the OS go down, or just the program?

I have a 15" iMac with Jaq and have NO problems with it. I have never crashed it once.

The only crash in my OS X experience (I think it was X.1) was trying to get a "test" version of Maya to run by hacking it in Unix.

Matthew
 
the entire system freezes up. Full system crash--the mouse icon moves but I can't force quit the application, I can't get the apple/option/esc function to work either. I have to use the power button to shut down. I has happened also with limewire--so I reloaded that today.
 
I just read a note somewhere. apparently, sometimes the force quit window does nto pop up to the front. Next time this happens (if it happens at all after the reload), try hitting the return key after cmd-option escape.
 
have you tried reinstalling from the CD, that always helps me if I corrupt my system (usually from installing themes that aren't compatible or once I deleted all my fonts :p)
 
Based on my experience with OS X, having had no system crashes at all with 10.2 and only three with earlier versions, I would suspect a hardware problem.

Are you running 10.2.2?

Do you have firewire or USB devices? Two of my kernel panics prior to Jaguar (10.2) were related to unplugging a USB floppy.

Suspect your memory chips. I've heard reports of flaky memory causing system crashes.

Are you running Samba? You'd be using Samba if you were networking your Mac and a Windows machine, for example. Samba is / was quirky sometimes. For example, Finder gets unhappy and hangs up for MINUTES if I put the PC to sleep while connected.

Good luck!

N.B.: Your mileage might vary. I am not a professional troubleshooter.

Doug
 
Shemina,

Your problem sounds EXACTLY the same as mine... I have a flat panel iMac 15" 40GB/g4-700/128mb that I bought in October with 10.1 pre-installed.

1) It came with 128mb. I thought lack of mem was the problem. I added 512mb - still crashes...

2) It came with 10.1, so I thought it was a 10.1 thing. I upgraded to Jag ($19.95 coupon). - it still crashes...

I can't do a clean Jag install. My Jag CD was the $19.95 coupon version and will only update an earlier install.

I have mimimal apps installed. The Mac is a living room digital hub and has 24GB of iTunes, so I still have several gigs of HD space left. I also have an Airport card which hooks up to my PC's 802.11b network.

---

The crashes are about once per week with about 2-3 hours daily use. I normally set the machine to sleep, rather than re-booting after daily use. I get 3 types of crash:-

1) An application (spinning colored beach ball icon) that I can seem to do nothing about and can't swap out of - the dock becomes unresponsive.

2) Finder crashes and gets stuck as it relaunches. Typically this happens after waking from sleep. The CD drive also gets stuck (with or without(!) CD in) and the system never stops trying to open it leading to spinning beachball and system unresponsiveness...

3) Spontaneous system freeze. These are scary. I had it happen today during iTunes. The music just stopped and the visualization froze too. Only option was to hold the power button and restart. The restart was slow.


---

After today's iTunes crash I went to the Apple support page and found nothing. I haven't called Apple yet, but will do so if I can figure out a pattern to the crashes. The only thing I have noticed is that it crashes most often on a Sunday (may be the work of the devil!) and in the middle of an album (when left untouched with iTunes visuals running). I tend to have it on all day on a Sunday unlike other days which may just mean that I see the crashes more on that day because it is on more on that day.

I also disabled my power management, which kicks in 45mins (i.e. the middle of an album) however, 1 more crash and I'm calling Apple. If this becomes the case, i will post again.
 
Well, I ran fsck -y with no luck in terms of finding problems. So, I ran disk utilities from the install disk and found that although the hard drive verify was clean the permissions were not. I ran the permissions repair about 5 times, it took about 1.5 hours before I had a clean repair (no errors).

I bought my machine with X.2.2 pre-installed, I've now re-installed it twice. The game Ghost Recon runs fine when I'm using system 9 but freezes the entire system in X.2.

On top of the real audio and game crashes, I had a crash using limewire, this afternoon.

It's too soon to tell if my attempts to repair the hard drive have been successful. I just finished that before writing this. We'll see how things go in the morning. I'm really nervous.

shem
 
just a few more bits of info that might help:
-I am not using a firewire
-I have several USB connections: iSub, imation superdrive (for floppy's and super disk), mouse, Lexmark Optra E310 printer, and a cable modem through the ethernet.

I think that's it
 
I aslo have an iSub and Imation SuperDisk drive .. my Mac is also rather crash-prone. Especially when putting it to sleep or running it after it has been sleeping. My other periferals include a VST FireWire harddrive and Epson Stylus 820 printer.
 
Well, people always seem to blame RAM upgrades when things like that go wrong ... ??? Can't say I've had that problem myself (iBook w/ 320Mb) ... but its probably worth a try experimenting with different RAM configurations (i.e. if it was crashing with the original 128, then take that out and only put your new RAM in - if it wasn't crashing before you put RAM in, then take the new RAM out and try it like that ... or course always remembering to put the bigger RAM in the lower slot :))

C
 
put the crash log on from the system preferences ? at least you will understand why it crashes = if the reason is always the same ... :confused:
 
the entire system freezes up. Full system crash--the mouse icon moves but I can't force quit the application
Click to expand...

this is not a crash...the system is still running fine under neath, but your programs have locked up. if you have access to another machine, ssh into your machine next time it does this and figgure out whats bringing down the house.

My best friend had problems similar to this on a quicksilver and it turned out to be a bad memory module...so I would suggest removing your ram chips one at a time; trial and error style.
 
Well, I had another full system crash. This time the mouse wouldn't move either. Nothing seems to work. So, I'm going to try and have the machine declared DOA because of the blue screen problem that occurred upon taking it out of the box. I love Mac but I hate what's happening to me and my cute machine:(
 
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