Weird, kind of spooky problem.

W

Walker

Registered
This is about my high school daughter's system. Sonnet G4 500 upgraded (originally Rev. 1 G3 400) B/W powermac with 512 megs ram, 80 gb HD, Cendyne branded Pioneer DVD-R Burner (A04 I think). Operating system is Panther.

My daughter uses this system for a lot of video editing (Final cut Express). In particular, she's been working on a big project where the movie is over an our long. Pretty intensive stuff for an old PowerMac, I know.

Lately the computer has been acting up. Crashing mainly during video editing stuff. Finally after one crash, the restart resulted in a screen having a circle with a slash through it.

When I heard about this, I immediately thought of the old OS 9 days and the dreaded blinking question mark. So I got my trusty new version of Diskwarrior, and rebooted her machine starting up off of the CD. Here's where the spooky thing happened. After I had made it through most of the boot up screen (after agreeing to diskwarrior license, etc.) the computer all of a sudden rebooted...ALL BY ITSELF. It started over from scratch. And once again had the circle with the slash. So then I tried a little different approach. I completely shut down the machine (even unplugged it). Then I did another restart off the diskwarrior CD. This time it worked. Diskwarrior found some errors, repaired them, and I kept my fingers crossed that all the problems were over.

Well, the problems still exist. According to my daughter it first starts out as a crash, or rather a spinning rainbow circle that doesn't quit. So she pushes the restart button in front of the computer. Upon restart, all she gets is the circle with the slash. However, based on our previous experience, she learned that if she completely shuts down the machine, and then restarts it will boot up as normal.

This machine has been a stable unit for a lot of years. I was even considering slapping in the new 1 gh sonnet upgrade when it becomes available. Any ideas what is going wrong here? Is my daughter doing too intensive of work for an old machine like this?

Thanks,

lw
 
I am experiencing the exact same thing. Except it was doing it it with jaguar as the main OS, and the machine is a dual 800 g4. The circle with the slash, then after a reboot, my machine comes up with no problem. Done this 3 times in a week now.
 
What is she doing when it crashes? What does the CPU load look like at the time? You might want to install something like LoadInDock (http://homepage.mac.com/takashi_hamada/Acti/MacOSX/LoadInDock/index.html) to see what the CPU usage has been at the time it freezes up, and it will also show what the CPU had been doing previously.

My gut feeling is this is happening while the CPU is under heavy load for a bit of time, which to me points at a cooling issue. The more a CPU is taxed, the hotter it gets, when it gets too hot, it starts tossing out errors and the system can start doing all sorts of very strange things. The disk error's you're seeing are more likely a result of whatever is freezing the system and happen because of having to hard reboot the system. You might want to check to make sure the cooling fan on the CPU is still running, and that there is free airflow on the front and back of the box.

Ofcourse, if it is also doing this while the system is idle, I'd look elsewhere.

Brian
 
btoneill said:
What is she doing when it crashes? What does the CPU load look like at the time? You might want to install something like LoadInDock (http://homepage.mac.com/takashi_hamada/Acti/MacOSX/LoadInDock/index.html) to see what the CPU usage has been at the time it freezes up, and it will also show what the CPU had been doing previously.

My gut feeling is this is happening while the CPU is under heavy load for a bit of time, which to me points at a cooling issue. The more a CPU is taxed, the hotter it gets, when it gets too hot, it starts tossing out errors and the system can start doing all sorts of very strange things. The disk error's you're seeing are more likely a result of whatever is freezing the system and happen because of having to hard reboot the system. You might want to check to make sure the cooling fan on the CPU is still running, and that there is free airflow on the front and back of the box.

Ofcourse, if it is also doing this while the system is idle, I'd look elsewhere.

Brian
Click to expand...

You may be right, Brian. The crashes do happen when the computer is under a heavy load. When you brought up the processor overheating possibility, it reminded me that when I added the sonnet upgrade, I didn't put any thermal paste or anything between the sonnet processor and the Apple heat sink. Months later I read about people experiencing heat issues if they installed a processor like I did. At the time, my daughter was only using the computer for internet stuff, so she wasn't taxing the computer at all. Now that she is into Final Cut express & iDVD, I'll bet the suckers overheating.

Tomorrow I head to radioshack to get some thermal paste. I'll keep you posted.

Thanks,

lw
 
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