my first OSX crash

L

lethe

Registered
I ve been running OSX since 10.0, full time since 10.1. i leave it on all the time, and don t boot OS9 (don t even have it installed), or run classic. what is that, almost a year, right?

i have bragged to my friends that OSX has never crashed. i have been in love with the OS for months now. but unfortunately today OSX crashed on my. several times. let me tell you what happened.

i am doing a full backup of my brother s W2K computer. about 20G of files have to be transfered. So i mount the windows drive on OSX, and drag all these files to onto an external 80GB firewire drive.

i always love how in windows, when you do a massive file transfer, if the number is too high, windows is entirely unable to give you an estimate of how long it will take. i mean, how hard is that? it is simple arithmatic! it gets some kind of over flow and starts telling you negative numbers and such. lookit: time left equals rate of transfer divided by size of files remaining. sheesh. i mean i don t rely on those numbers too heavily, cause the rates aren t constant, they usually aren t too accurate, but at least you get a sense that you re making progress... the MacOS has always been perfectly able to handle this simple arithmatic.

so anyway, back to my story.... OSX transferred several folders and several Gigs without hitch, then somewhere around the 5GB mark, the progress just stopped. i let it sit for a while, to see if it were going to pick up the ball again, but it became pretty clear that it was not.
 
bear in mind that all this time i was talking on IM with Fire, working in mathematica, surfing the internet with iCab, and listening to music with iTunes. the finder continued to function, it just stalled the transfer and wouldn t start it again.

so i click stop on the file transfer window. nothing. i click a bunch more. nothing. i try to kill the process from terminal. nothing. finally i relaunch finder. it works... sort of. finder quit, but didn t automatically relaunch like it should. so i launch it myself, and decide it s time for the reboot.

uh oh, finder is not responding to my reboot from the apple menu. OK, i ll do it the hard way. sudo shutdown -r now. now all the apps quit, and it looks like it s not going to restart. but i just get infinite spinning rainbow beachball. this sucks. now i have to hit the restart button on the computer face. i can t remember the last time i had to do this. it has been a long time i think.

I have a 733MHz Quicksilver, 1GB RAM, 10.1.3. i m not upset or anything, because OSes that can function flawlessly for months like the way OSX does are rare.

it was rough. i m still gonna have to figure out a way to backup these files
 
It's a bitter blow, I know.

I've had OSX crash 4 times .. FOUR TIMES!!..

All because of the Classic environment messing up my modem and/or messing with the sleep mode.

While I'm just running OSX the machine is rock solid, as soon as I start up Classic, I have to swith off sleep and make sure that I don't try connecting to the internet. Then after I quit Classic, I have to restart OSX to get things back to normal.

I'm just waiting for my copy of PhotoShop 7 [already got Golive 6 & illustrator 10, both for X] to arrive sometime mid April. After that I'm never going back to 9.
 
Funny thing is, that's not a crash per definition.

I was talking to a Windows lover who bragged of never crashing. Seems we have different definitions of the word 'crash'.
While I define crash as 'stopped working' or 'not doing what I ask it to', this guy was talking about all sorts of stuff like stalling and freezing.
A crash is apparently when the computer stops working, you get a weird screen and the computer refuses to do anything you tell it to, ever again.

somehow, I think I've been too quick in judging my Mac...
 
The only thing which will crash OSX is large file transfert (a few GB) to my FW HD, which works fine in OS 9. I have never been able to find any article about the problem anywhere... good luck to you.
Hopefully it will be solved in 10.2, but I doubt it.
BTW, what chipset does your firewire HD uses? To known that, open Apple's disk utility and look at the HD's name in the list at the left of the widnow. Mine is based on an Oxford chipset, wonder if yours is as well...
 
Good news!.. no more crashes!..

I get the odd moment when the machine becomes less than responsive, but I always get a full recovery [with the hard drive thrashing away for about 5 or 6 minutes]

And the reason for my good fortune? I don't use Classic anymore!..

I got my copy of Adobe Photoshop 7 and I've never looked back.
 
If you have a LaCie drive, it might be LaCie. My LaCie USB 40 gig locks up and crashes my finder and Carracho Server. LaCie says "reformat it and it will be fine." Ok, I don't have another disk to back it up to so I am screwed! LaCie I am disapointed!!!!
 
I'm pretty sure it's not a lacy.

To octane: I always crash, even if Classic is not launched

To Powermaster: if you have the same problem as me, reformatting is no use. I tried HFS, HFS+,UFS,FAT32, all in vain. Bah.
 
My G4 doesn't exactly crash, but it loves to hang about every other day. I have a second phone line that is dedicated to internet use. I often just dialup my ISP and let it stay connected until I need to reboot my G4 for some reason. Then I share this connection among several computers. More often than not, I have to force reboot, although not by my choice. I have the screensaver with password enabled, so when I'm away from my computer it turns on. If my dialup connection gets dropped or screwed up in someway, my system will hang and not want to come out of the screensaver. I get the colorful spinning disk platter with the screensaver in the background until I force reboot my machine by hitting the reset button on the front of my G4. I've had this problem ever since I started using OS X. The same thing would happen when my G4 was on the LAN. If the internet connection over the LAN would get disrupted while the screensaver was running, it would hang and need to be force rebooted. So if you define a crash as not being able to use your local computer until you restart, then I crash every other day or so. Although, I would just called this a hang, since the system still does stuff in the background and is not fully frozen. I believe Apache still serves up webpages and remote SSH sessions are still available. I really wish this problem would get fixed.
 
Hummm, My problem sounds alot like this.


I also notice the statis light on my drive stays lit untill I reboot the drive. :(
 
Have you tried phoning Apple or LaCie? There is no info in the knowledge database on such a problem... strange and annoying :(
 
I noticed that you were running 10.1.3 and I know that I had problems connecting to and transferring files under 10.1.3. In fact I even had 2 or 3 kernel panics. Apple said that some issues were resolved in the 10.1.4 update but we are now at 10.1.5 so maybe it will work now.
 
Who is running 10.1.3? I am running 10.1.5 the newest update.


Also, I did call LaCie and they said I needed to reformat cause the driver was not compadible with X. But back to my problem. I do not have another drive at this time so it is impossible to reformat without losing 35 gig of data.


The other problem is that Lacie's Phone numbers are all Long distance. No 1-800? That sux!

//
 
But I had the same problems since 10.1 at least... updates does not seem to make a difference. As for reformating, it did no good =/
I doubt it's a problem with the HD, since it works fine in OS 9.
BTW, my HD is realy an ATA drive in a FW box... are yours true FW HD?
 
you won't like this answer but you might get the files transferred.

boot into os 9. not classic. pure 9. chances are good that your transfer will go smooth, even if it's not quite as fast.

i had this problem with my externals. i got acom to help me update the bridge and all is fine with it. the maxtor still needs updating. good luck finding a tech support person who will help you do this. Be sure you talk like you know what the problem is. make sure you talk to the supervisor. you might even have to make multiple calls just to talk to somebody that understands macs. be prepared to do some terminal style installation commands.

but above all, insist to the drive manufacturer that it is their fault and you know it!! at least one drive manufacturer has shown me it is fixable.
 
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