what to do when the system crashes?

E

Elliotjnewman

Registered
running Panther on a quicksilver G4 dual 1.25 with 512 ram.

Sometimes Panther crashes, or seems to crash, it shows that multi coloured spinning circle as a cursor for ages. I cant do anything, alt option esc doesnt work and I cant click on anything. I usually just hold the power button down on the front of the machine to reboot it - is this a bad idea? are there other alternatives?

Cheers, Elliot.
 
You should repair permissions and check the disc from time to time. All can be done in your application folder -> Utilities -> Disk Utility
 
I have repaired permissions. Thanks. But what is the usual thing to do when the system doesnt respond like that? Also what does 'repair permissions' do?
 
sometimes permission can be modified and thus certain processes have no rights to access or modify certain files. This can cause troubles and that's why the first step should be repairing these.
Once a system is not booting anymore, I would boot into the single user mode (holing apple+s while booting) and run fsck (filesystem check). If your os is somehow damaged, you will have to use your panther disc to either re-install the os or maybe boot from another partition and check what's wrong with your files. Maybe an important file for your boot-routine was deleted and you can "somehow" recover it..
 
Do you, by chance, have the machine attached to a network? What application are you running when you have the problem?

Doug
 
It seems to have trouble opening the info when I click on show info for the hard drive, just hangs for ages. I really need more ram so Im gonna buy a 512 slot and maybe that will fix it cause I run photoshop and maya (3d animation) so I could do with a bit more, maybe?
 
Elliot,

That's not normal, your machine hanging for ages. How much free space do you have on the hard drive? Is it full? If so, you must free up more than 1 gig.

Try this:

A) If you have the Applecare extended warranty, find your Techtool Deluxe cd and boot from it. Restart the computer and immediately hold down the 'C' key. Follow the directions from there.

Or

B) If you have Techtool Pro or Diskwarrior, follow the directions included with the utilities to boot from the cd and check your hard drive.

Or

C) Restart and immediately hold down 'command-s' (Apple key +'s').
This is single-user mode.
When you get a prompt (something like "localhost:/ >") then type "fsck -y" without the quotes.
Press the RETURN key.
Wait.
Run fsck again ('fsck -y' <return>) if you get a message that "The filesystem was modified."
Type "reboot" without the quotes.
Pess the RETURN key.

I appologize if any of this was too elementary. If you have more questions, let us know.
 
Whenever you restart your computer after a crash you shoud run Disk Utility > First Aid to make sure nothing was damaged... If you don't do that, problems can snowball and become bigger/worse headaches.

Also... 95 times out of a 100 the spinning wheel does NOT = "crash"... Excercise paitence and it will eventually finish doing whatever is causing the spinning wheel.

The only time you should need to use the power button to restart is when you get a kernel panic.

If you are really curious what's going on, and you have a second computer you might be able to ssh remote login to you machine and run the ps command to see what applicaiton is having trouble... From there you can kill the problem program and not need to restart the entire machine.
 
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