G4 Duel 1GHz MDD locks up 1 app at a time

Question

Level 1

9 points

G4 Duel 1GHz MDD locks up 1 app at a time

Hello all,
I am new to this forum but have been Mac over 10 years. Honestly I have had no problems till now.
My G4 will be running just fine with perhaps 2 apps open and one will lock up, with the color wheel spinning. Other apps running fine. Then suddenly another app will lock. Eventually the system will lock and a reset is required. There are no logs or alerts and no common programs that are to blame. I just upgraded to Leopard from Tiger and a PCI SATA because I was having this problem before. The SATA is much faster and Leopard is great, but the problem persist. I have 2 Gb of ram from Micron Technology.
I am waiting on a 256MB ATI Radeon 9600 Pro to replace the stock video card. Any other ideas?

G4 Duel 1GHz MDD, Mac OS X (10.5.5), 2 G of ram USB2 card from Sonnet PCI SATA card with Seagate 80G hard drive for boot

Posted on Dec 16, 2008 11:50 AM

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Answer 1

Dec 16, 2008 12:30 PM in response to Soundman52

Hi! Since you have replaced the hard drives with a sata setup and the problem persists and also the fact that it persists from Tiger to Leopard indicates a possible logic board problem. Tom

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Answer 2

Dec 17, 2008 5:55 AM in response to Soundman52

Welcome to the forum Soundman.

You could try the hardware test from your original OSX install disks to check your hardware out. It could be a memory issue (not seated correctly/disturbed after your last upgrade etc) so you could download rember and give your system a thorough memory test.

Best of luck and report back with your progress.

Chris.

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Answer 3

1 Vision

Level 1

12 points

Dec 17, 2008 9:51 AM in response to Soundman52

This same thing is happening to me. It seems that everyone that has a G4 and has Leopard installed has LOGIC BOARD problems. Isn't that a strange coincidence. It may be apples way of telling us that's all we're going to get out of our outdated G4's. I was really hoping they would have resolved this with their latest update.

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Answer 4

Dec 17, 2008 11:14 AM in response to 1 Vision

Hi! That's a broad generalization. My G4 has run Leo prefectly fince since the first day it came out. Tom

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Answer 5

Dec 17, 2008 1:38 PM in response to Soundman52

Cooked RAM ? Open up ASP when problems start to occur, or immediately after the restart. I used to get one of my 512MB DIMMs showing up as Empty, or 256MB. Lifetime guarantee, so the shop replaced it over the counter and never happened since.

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Answer 6

Soundman52 Author

Level 1

9 points

Dec 23, 2008 1:33 PM in response to Thomas Bryant

Thank you so much for the welcome and the ideas. I have just put in new matched ram (2Geg)
A new Seagate SATA hard drive with Leopard 10.5.4. A PCI SATA card for Mac. Checked and reseated everything. The working speed is great, but the problem seems to be related to run time. The longer the system is on, the more these problems occur. One example; I open disk utilities and it can not find the drives, any of them, and gets locked up. A force quit dose nothing. Other things are still working and I can open the drives and see the data there-on. If I open say, ITunes, it will open, it will work, but I can't close it. It will leave the screen but continues to be active and force quit will not work. If I push it one more program or action, it locks up completely with the color wheel spinning. I have to hard re-start. Also, after the G4 has been on a while, I can not shut it down with a simple shut-down command. The screen will clear, the wheel will spin at the bottom center of the screen, and it will stay like that until I hold the power button to force shut-down. I can find nothing wrong.
I also have no original install disc, is there another way to get diagnostic tools?
Thank you so much for the reply.

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Answer 7

Soundman52 Author

Level 1

9 points

Dec 23, 2008 1:35 PM in response to BlakeyPie

Thank you Chris, i am trying to find another way to do a hardware test, I do not have the original install disc. Vic

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Answer 8

Dec 23, 2008 4:30 PM in response to Soundman52

Hi! Look HERE on hardware test images. Tom

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Answer 9

Soundman52 Author

Level 1

9 points

Dec 26, 2008 6:36 AM in response to BlakeyPie

Well I had ordered a new Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB SATA/300 7200RPM 16MB HDD and since
installed it. I then cloned my existing drive to it and set it as my startup drive. Since the the problem
has not resurfaced. I don't know if it is solved or just gone "for now" but the G4 is working great and is
amazingly fast. I use a a disk and system organizer called SOCKS and running it in light maintenance
mode every 3 days or so and this system is almost as fast as my quad-core Mac Pro. I appreciate all of the help and suggestions and for now, I will wait and see if the problem shows up in the future.
Thanks Chris and everyone else as well.
Sincerely;
Vic

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