QUAD Crashing

Question

Level 1

125 points

QUAD Crashing

OK you G5 geniuses ...

At least 2-3 times a week I have full-on lock-up of my QUAD [w/3 GB or RAM]. When I say lock-up, I mean I cannot do anything. The the only way to remedy the situation is to do a hard-restart. I would love to reinstall the OS, but I have a major deadline in 4 weeks so this is not going to happen - yet. Is there any other reason this could be happening. Should I rebuild my boot disk with disk warrior? Any ideas?

QUAD+PowerBook G4+Cinema Display, Mac OS X (10.4)

Posted on Apr 8, 2006 12:55 PM

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Answer 1

Mac-Medic

Level 6

17,301 points

Apr 8, 2006 1:17 PM in response to KentZ

OK you G5 geniuses ...

At least 2-3 times a week I have full-on lock-up of
my QUAD [w/3 GB or RAM]. When I say lock-up, I mean
I cannot do anything. The the only way to remedy the
situation is to do a hard-restart. I would love to
reinstall the OS, but I have a major deadline in 4
weeks so this is not going to happen - yet. Is there
any other reason this could be happening. Should I
rebuild my boot disk with disk warrior? Any ideas?

Yes, try running DW. You may have some bad sectors on your hard drive. This can cause freezes. You would need to reformat to fix that. If your mouse freezes, try unplugging it for a few seconds and plug it back it. See if you can regain control.

- Bmer
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Answer 2

KentZ Author

Level 1

125 points

Apr 8, 2006 2:02 PM in response to Mac-Medic

Bad sectors ... yes I was thinking that might be it, but as you say, I'd need to reformat and write zeros to the disk to bypass them. I may just wait until I toss a Raptor in as a boot drive. In the meantime, I'll try DW and see what happens. I'm starting to lose work as a result of this which is pi$$ing me off. I would have reinstalled the OS when I received the quad, but again ... a major deadline was looming.

Any other thoughts out there ...?

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Answer 3

Apr 8, 2006 2:08 PM in response to KentZ

I would predict that ram is the issue...
Have you run the EXTENDED hardware test on the tiger disk?

I have had ram that seemed like it was ok, and passed the normal test but then failed the extended test. I replaced the ram and my lovely G5 got back to working properly.

Let me know if this helps.

-aj

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Answer 4

KentZ Author

Level 1

125 points

Apr 8, 2006 2:12 PM in response to Adam Craig

How long does the extended hardware test take ... is this like an overnight thing? I will definitely try that too.

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Answer 5

chainsaw

Level 1

45 points

Apr 8, 2006 3:38 PM in response to KentZ

Suggest you run Memtest (command line) or Rember (GUI) on continuous overnight (12 hours) to absolutely eliminate bad RAM from the equation. You may want to consider running the test several times to confirm original findings.

http://www.memtestosx.org/
or
http://www.kelleycomputing.net:16080/rember/

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