Mac Crashes every 7 Days -- Seems related to Software Update

M

MidnightJava

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I've been having periodic crashes for quite some time now. The Mac will crash exactly 7 days from the time I boot it. Currently I'm on a cycle where it crashes every Saturday evening. FWIW, the weekly maintenance scripts don't run on Saturday (and every crash has been at a different time of day than the weekly scripts launch time).

Crashes occur in one of two flavors. Either the monitor is completely black, and the system is unresponsive to remote connection from my Windows PC (which normally can see the Mac file system), or I get an error message saying that the Mac crashed and must be rebooted.

Checking the Console log file, I see that a Software Update was apparently initiated just before the crash occurred. But if I do a manual update (click "Check Now"), it completes normally. (I've done this when there was an update to install, and when there was not.) Originally I had Software Update set for weekly updates. Now I've changed it to Daily updates, but it still only crashes on Saturdays. I see from the Console log that the software update check is initiated every day at the same time, but only on Saturdays does a crash occur.

I'm running a Mac Mini PPC, with OS 10.4.
 
You have a very strange problem. It almost seems related to some esoteric electrical interference that propagates on saturdays...

My thought is that you might end up doing more harm than good if you try to fix this problem in your preexisting system. I would completely wipe the hard drive and install a fresh copy of Tiger.
 
Qion said:
You have a very strange problem. It almost seems related to some esoteric electrical interference that propagates on saturdays...
Click to expand...

It used to fail on Sundays. I'm pretty sure it's failing when a software update is attempted when the system has been up for 7 days, rather than failing when software update is attempted on a certain day of the week. I'm going to test this by rebooting it tomorrow and seeing if it starts failing on Sundays again.

Qion said:
My thought is that you might end up doing more harm than good if you try to fix this problem in your preexisting system. I would completely wipe the hard drive and install a fresh copy of Tiger.
Click to expand...

It may come to that. Do I really need to wipe the disk? Couldn't I just re-install Tiger and keep my apps and settings?
 
Well, you could, but it may be the case that your user files or applications could be holding the *thing* that's causing your issue. Plus, if you clean out your whole system and the issue continues, you'll know that something is faulty with your hardware.
 
For future reference, you should take the following steps before performing an update to the OS either through Software Update or manually by downloading the update from the Apple website.

  1. Disconnect all peripherals except the keyboard and mouse.
  2. Repair permissions through Disk Utility.
  3. Perform Update.
  4. Be patient! (Sometimes the updates perform TWO reboots as of late.)
  5. After the Update has finished installing, repair permissions again.
  6. Reconnect all of your peripherals (preferably one by one) so that if there is a problem you can pinpoint the cause much easily.

Give that a try if you're doing to do a clean installation and let us know if you still exhibit any problems.
 
Thanks everyone for the suggestions. I definitely want to avoid having to re-install and configure all my software. I do software development on the Mac, so there are lots of things to install. I'll try things in the following order, and address the idea of wiping the disk and starting over when I see how these efforts fare.

1. Boot on some day other than Saturday, to verify that the problem occurs after 7 days up-time, not when the current day is Saturday.

2. See if turning of auto-update feature fixes the problem.

3. Re-install OS, retaining existing apps.

It will take two weeks to get through steps 1 and 2, due to the periodicity of the problem, and I can't start until after this weekend since I'll be away. So it will be a few weeks, but I'll post my results when I have them.
 
You could try a fresh user account (to be deleted later) and see if the problem repeats. If it doesn't you know there's something wrong with your user account.
 
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