my panther nightmare

R

rkowal

Registered
OK, so my iBook 700 has a history.
Last summer a storm blew open the window over my desk and it got inundated by about an inch of rainwater. (new motherboard, not covered by warranty :-(). Then, I dropped it twice. The last time, the Cd-rom door blew open, and since then the drive has been acting up. Nevertheless, I had been running 10.2.8 blissfully, with no problem, and thought: thumbs up, Apple, these iBooks are sturdy!
Come in Panther: clean install (archive option). The finder crashes, ca. every 15 min. Word crashes, Safari, almost any application crashes. Then the whole sysem crashes, normally when I do something in the Finder. Uptime rarely more than 1 hour. So I put all my data onto ext HD, wipe the drive clean, and do another clean install. Seems better at first, then same problems again. I decide that it might haver to do with my CD-Rom drive being dodgy. So I go to University, slot the Panther Install CD into the school's G4, my iBook in Firewire target mode, another clean install. Same problems again. I've had at least 100 hard system crashes since insalling Panther.

Now, you might say, no wonder, with the history of your machine. But: how is it possible that Jaguar runs without a glitch, and Panther not at all on my machine?
Have gone back to 10.2.8, another clean install. Uptime 5 days and running. No problems at all, solid as a rock.

Now is this a mystery, or what?
 
I believe 10.3 was built with gcc 3, while 10.2 was made with gcc 2. Perhaps new PPC optimizations are stressing one critically weak point of the system.
 
Oh yeah. Heh. That's the compiler that's included with the system that will build binaries from the source code. I've heard that version 3 has better support for certain PPC optimizations, but that might be just for better G5 support. I can't remember for sure.
 
Oh yeah. Heh. That's the compiler that's included with the system that will build binaries from the source code. I've heard that version 3 has better support for certain PPC optimizations, but that might be just for better G5 support. I can't remember for sure.
Click to expand...

Uhm, just so you know, 10.2.8 was built on GCC 3.1, and 10.3 was built on GCC 3.3

3.1 broke a lot of stuff over 2.95 (used for 10.0 and 10.1)... but 3.3 broke a couple things too.

Now my question to the owner of the iBook is this: What upgrades have you done since getting the machine, what new hardware do you have plugged in, and pretty much what is different from the stock hardware? A complete list of the items you use with the machine (plugged in via Firewire or USB), and upgrades to RAM over the bare model would do wonders to tracking down your problem.

It seems like these problems where Jaguar was stable and Panther wasn't are related to hardware conflicts, where updated drivers managed to mangle everything up.
 
Krevinek, the only thing that's different from when I bought the iBook is the additional RAM, a good quality Kingston 512MB chip. Never had any problems with it in Jaguar. The ext. Firewire drive was borrowed, the only other devices I use regularly is a Logitech USB mouse, and a ZIP USB drive (but I tested that: computer also crashed when I unplugged everything). BTW, Hardware test found no problems.
 
That's strange. Have you tried downloading the latest patches? That might help, but I doubt it.

Sounds really strange to me, as I've never heard of such a thing happening to a computer (well, PC) before and I'm assuming that macs aren't any different.
 
RAM -

Don't think just because its Kingston that is won't fail. Believe it or not, some RAM works better with some OS's. I would try yanking the Kingston, installing Panther again. It might not help at all, but I think it's worth a shot.
 
I've taken the RAM out, and slotted in the Install Disc. Well, the Installer crashed when opening the Welcome window!!!
As you can imagine, I did not feel like proceeding any further at that point, and put the RAM back into the machine (I mean, the likelihood of both my CD-ROM drive and the RAM being the cause is kind of small).
 
Did you take all the RAM out? Leave one in and try it, then try the other chip alone.
 
I had many problems with one of the 10.2 versions contantly locking up. Turned out it was my 256mb Apple chip that came with my system. It ran fine with just that chip, but when I added more ram it completely choked. So I pulled the 256 and kept the 1GB of samsung I had purchased (And samsung is what apple uses) and things have been great ever since.

So pull the ram per Arden instructions.
 
Thanks for the suggestions, guys. But I have an iBook 700, with only one 520 MB chip that I can take out, and I did that...

it's really weird, I seem to be the only person on the net who has that problem with Panther. Makes you feel kind of lonely :)
 
Yeah, iBooks only have one RAM slot. :p

The profiler will report a second slot, but that's actually hardwired onto the motherboard.
 
He, maybe this is the solution/problem.
Here at work we've updated 10.2.8 to 10.3.1
And all program's start normal and then one by one they chrash
The problem here was Quickeys
We've turn'd it off and no problems anymore
 
Not liklely Quickeys is the problem here.

By the way, Quickeys has been updated for Panther and works fine now.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top