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Unstable System – Help!?
G4
OSX 10.3.9Having some odd problems that are getting increasingly worse; if I’m in a program (Final Cut 3.0, DVDSP2,etc) I am fine. But. . .if I try to exit that program too fast, I completely lock up (spinning beachball) and the only way I can get going again is to reboot first in SAFE MODE and then do a “normal” restart.
I have to go through SAFE MODE first, because otherwise I can’t get any further than the gray Apple screen (and the spinning “clock” underneath it freezes as well).
In addition, I cannot open iDVD, iPhoto or iMovie (not that I need to, but I should be able to).
Boot drive is 60G with about 10G free, and a secondary internal drive is a 120G with about half of it free. . .although sometimes it takes three or four reboots for OSX to even recognize this secondary drive.
I’ve repaired permissions from time to time (almost too much, I think) and done the DiscWarrior and Techtools things that show no apparent problems, but it is obvious I am skating on thin ice here.
Any help would me most appreciated.
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6 Replies
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What does “quitting too fast” mean? What you describe sounds like it could be anything, so more information would help… Is it only when using RAM hungry apps like FCP or DVDSP? Does it happen randomly too, or just when quitting applications?
Do the tools you’ve used find anything wrong with your system? Have you done a complete sector check of your HD to make sure parts of it haven’t gone bad?
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Do you have Virex or Norton installed?
Rob
UK -
Yeah, this happens pretty much randomly; no, I don’t have the virus software installed as suggested.
I guess what I was saying is I am a quick trigger with a mouse, like we all probably are. And that probably has nothing to do with this problem. Again, if I’m in an application (usually FCP, DVDSP or Disk Utilities) I’ll be rolling along fine, and then one click to either close or save and there’s the spinning beach ball.
For a while this was only happening in FCP, always when I was in the titler. Click, click, there’s the spinning ball and I’d have no way out of it except to do a hard restart, as Force Quitting wouldn’t work. I’m just afraid that all that hard restarting finally took its toll. .
DiscWarrior does its thing with the directories, but Techtools freezes up alot during maintenance (running it from the CD drive) and I haven’t been able to do a complete optimization because of this. And sometimes, that secondary drive I spoke about. . .the 120. . .doesn’t even show up in Techtools. So the long and the short of it is that, no, the maintenance software doesn’t alert me to a problem because it’s never been able to get through a full battery of tests and maintenance.
If there was a problem with the motherboard, would all this be happening?
Could this be virus-related?
Again. . .many, many thanks.. .
Glenn -
Try running one of the cache cleaning applications like: Cache Out https://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/14850 or you can use Cocktail which does even more: https://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/26124
Also, delete preferences & caches for FCP and DVDSP. Double check you have 15 – 20% of empty hard drive space. If nothing else, you can try the Archive and Install option from your OS X installer disks. Be sure to select the options to save your applications and files. Since you are running older versions of FCP and other applications, its also possible you updated one piece of software or hardware and now it is not compatible with those software versions or older OS.
Tony!
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If there was a problem with the motherboard, would all this be happening?
I can think of one possibility that would cause this and that is a bad memory RAM.
Try running the system diagnostic disk that came with your system first and loop it for a few hous to see if it can catch something.
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I had similar problems as far as locking up, crashing, and multiple reboots to find the hard drive.
I used all the diagnostic tools I could find, but came up short.
The Apple warranty allowed me to bring it into a shop. It ended up that my hard drive had just gone bad.
A bad hd is very much worth looking into, and not that expensive (in time or money) to test.
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