my first OSX crash

I know that it works in OS9... that's what I do.

However, you are sure it's a problem with the drive's bridge? That suck, mine was made by a third-rate company that does not even have offices in France...
 
i had it again! this time with a different drive and a different computer. same exact crash though. makes me suspect the firewire implementation in OSX, rather than the HD manufacturer.

the disk is the 5GB Firefly model #JH2127 from SmartDisk Corp that came free with my mothers new laptop. the computer is a TiBook 667.

off i go to your other thread
 
it happened to me again today. this time, i was not transferring a huge amount of data, rather, i was un-tarring a rather large tar file, on my firewire drive.

the firewire drive stopped responding, and iTunes, the one window of Terminal.app with the tar process, and Finder.app all ceased to respond to input. although other apps seem to work just fine, it is impossible to kill the frozen apps. even shutdown -h now results in an endless spinning beachball of death.

this time, i am quite vexed: i damaged the filesystem on the disk when i forced reboot, and can t get techtool to fix it, so i am afraid of losing all my data.

has any of us submittted a bug report yet? i think i will do that now. remarks about firmware from the drive manufacturer notwithstanding, i suspect OSX firewire implementation, since i have seen this on different machines with different drives.
 
here is my bug report:

OSX has been almost entirely crash proof, since i ve started using it. there is one particular crash that i have observed in OSX, today for the third time (in about a year. all in all, a pretty good record).

but the circumstances of the crash are consistent, and i suspect a problem in OSX firewire implementation.

when transferring a large amount of data (<3-5 GB) to an external firewire disk, the disk will stop responding, and the application that was accessing the disk will have only a spinning rainbow beachball. using terminal.app to kill -KILL the process fails, as does esc-option force quit. telling finder to restart the computer does not help, nor does shutdown -r now in terminal. forced restart is required.

this crash first occured for me march 2002, with OSX 10.1.3. i was transferring a large amount of data, backing up a windows (W2K, SP2) machine using OSX smb client, onto an external FW HD, a LaCie 80GB, purchased about feb-march 2002. i tried it maybe three times before giving up; each time grashing my OSX box the same way. all the running apps continue to function fine (love that protected memory), but i cannot launch new apps, and i cannot quit any of the apps that are accessing the FW drive, like iTunes. esc-option cannot quit finder or iTunes. i just get spinning beachball of rainbow. my machine was a 733 MHz G4 Quicksilver.

i blamed it on windows the first time, and figured some other way of transferring the files. then it happened again.

the second time, i was running OSX10.1.5, on a Titanium G4 powerbook, at 667 MHz, purchased may or june 2002. it came with a free 5 GB firefly FW external HD model #JH2127 from SmartDisk Corp. in june, the titanium laptop underwent the same crash, where finder stopped responding to input after a heavy transfer over the firewire drive. i was playing a video game (Giants: Citizen Kabuto) that was intalled on the FW drive, so the game data was being transferred, presumably something <= 600MB?

today, i had the experience a third time. i was not trasferring data, i was untarring a large tar file that resides on my FW LaCie 80GB HD (again with my 733 MHz G4 Quicksilver). i was untarring this file in terminal.app, and terminal froze up, and ^C would not return the prompt to me. i can t tell you how big the tar file is, because the reboot killed the filesystem on the drive this time. iDrive 10 should arrive soon. additionally, iTunes, which had been playing mp3s from the FW harddrive, immediately stopped responding to user input (iTunes exhibited this behaviour on these previous crashes too), and finder stopped responding. if i activate one of these apps in the Dock, i cannot use the app, but instead see only the spinning rainbow beachball. other apps continue to work fine.

so i have had this kind of crash occur on several diffferent occcasions, with totally different hardware arrangements. i have discussed the problem with a few others who have observed the same crash. see our threads: http://www.macosx.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=15071 and http://www.macosx.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=18915 for more reference.

i cannot be sure whether it is the OS or the hardware that is at fault, but the fact that the same crash can be observed for different hardware configurations suggests the former. i hope that i can help resolve this, and thanks for your time, and keep up the good work! thanks for your time.
Click to expand...
 
The same problem happens with both my LaCie 40 gig and my Acom 100GB the only difference is that they are on usb and not firwire.

I have an iMac Rev A 333MHZ
384mb Ram
and Mac os 10.1.5
 
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