Oh, screw it, I’m going to have to reinstall Tiger. Sod it, sod it, sod it
I’ve had this Powerbook since February last year, in the course of which I did a complete reinstall (on the first day - that was with 10.3) and then did an upgrade install of 10.4, aka OSX “Tiger”, when I got an - well, the - early review copy.
I’m starting to think that upgrade installs are a Bad Idea. Or else that something has got really screwed up in the past year or so.
Item: my wife’s (formerly my) 5-year-old iBook is on 10.3.9. It’s a 500MHz G3, running Eudora, Safari, Word, a few things like that. It wakes up and goes to sleep like that. Open: awake. Shut: asleep. No muss, no fuss.
And in the red corner, my 1.67GHz G4 with 1 gig of RAM (two 512MB chips, if you’re going to really enquire). I run Camino, Eudora, NetNewsWire, MarsEdit, Word, Address Book, VoodooPad, iCal, Preview…
I close the lid: there’s at least a 10-15 second delay before it goes to sleep. Sometimes longer. I open the lid: sometimes the screen wipes and it seems to be having a think before we come back. And there’s often some more musing on the machine’s part before we’re ready to do battle. Call it 30 seconds from opening the lid to being ready for business and you’re probably right.
Now, I’ve complained before that NetNewsWire and MarsEdit are resource hogs: NNW because I keep a lot of old articles; MarsEdit because it just seems to be a resource pig that refreshes web preview pages and part-pages that were fine unrefreshed, thanks (and on which you’ve clicked “Don’t refresh”). The folk at Ranchero know about the latter problem. A fix may be in sight, but not to me. (And while I was writing this MarsEdit lost all my shortcut settings for putting HTML tags in. This is just insane behaviour. Unless I somehow managed to press “Reset All”, which is not the sort of thing I’d try to do ever. Even if I’m considering a Reset All on this machine.)
That could be one cause of the delay. But more stuff is happening too. For example, from time to time applications hang all over the place, and there’s no recovery. Right now there’s a group including Camino, Mail, VoodooPad Pro (I’m testing the beta; it’s great), iCal, MenuCalendarClock and VoodooPad (stable version) which are all sitting in Activity Monitor, which declares that they’re “not responding”. Arse. I’ve got pages in Camino that I really don’t want to lose by force-quitting.
What makes this more annoying is that I had exactly this problem earlier today, when a whole bunch of other apps all just gave it the thousand-yard stare. Camino wasn’t going to do anything more. I couldn’t even launch Activity Monitor to find out what was hung; it bounced a few times, sat in the Dock but never came to life. “Can’t contact AppleSpell”, Mail said plaintively, in between giving me the SPOD. I had a Terminal window open, but couldn’t create a new one. Force-reboot was all that was left; even pressing the power button and pressing “Restart” didn’t work.
So that’s twice in one day that I’ve had a big crash, and in both cases it’s lost me work in progress. I’m starting to think that something in 10.4 has got badly futzed up somewhere along the line. Problem is that there’s only one way to properly fix that: back up, wipe, reinstall.
Oh nooooo.
Here’s why I don’t want to do this.
- I have tons of apps in /Applications which aren’t Apple ones. Which means (a) moving those all to a special folder and backing that up (b) getting all the licence details out of /Preferences and /Application Support. Argh.
- Backing up my home folder is going to be one of those hellish processes that will take forever. Even though I’ve moved all my music out, there’s still a ton of stuff in there - 29 gigabytes. Which means it’s too big for any attachable HFS+ disk I’ve got lying around. (Although.. hang on, 15GB of that is ripped DVDs from DVDs I own. OK, so 14GB. That’s closer to manageable. Though only just.)
It’s such a dread-full process even thinking about it that I’d much rather hear someone tell me in a lazy comment that it’s perfectly simple, this is a known bug in lookupd or configd or some other piece of Unix underpinning that can be fixed by a quick bit of bit twiddling. God, I hope so. The alternatives are
1) have machine that craps out occasionally for no obvious reason
2) have machine that has consumed huge amount of time but might still crap out for no obvious reason.
One thing I do know about my wife’s iBook: I did do a clean install of Panther on that. I backed up all the data and so on and did the move. In those days I had so much time….
(Postscript: all the time I have been writing this post - about 40 minutes - those apps mentioned above have been hung. I tried force-quitting Address Book and restarting it. It starts - but just goes into the SPOD. Same with VoodooPad Pro. And VoodooPad. Apps that weren’t running before start fine. Apps that were hung stay hung. What the hell is that about? Something not releasing? It’s infuriating. It feels as though the whole thing is just succumbing to digital cruft, heading into a spiral .. oh, hang on, Proteus (an IM app) started up but now is “not responding” too. I might have to save this post to stop it disappearing up some sort of “not responding” fundament.)
Post-postscript: I’ve had to restart the whole thing (and now MarsEdit’s shortcuts have come back. I feel ill..), because apps that I quit wouldn’t restart. Then I had the bright idea of looking at the console.log:Jun 19 17:26:51 Charless-PowerBook kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_unmount: /Volumes/Technology, flags 524288, pid 39
Jun 19 17:26:51 Charless-PowerBook KernelEventAgent[39]: tid 00000000 found 1 filesystem(s) with problem(s)
Jun 19 17:30:06 Charless-PowerBook ntpd[269]: sendto(17.72.133.42): Can't assign requested address
And that’s pretty much when the troubles started - this evening, at least. Which makes it all seem like the system got very, very upset when I pulled the Ethernet cord out rather than pressing the “Eject” icon on the screen at work (the link to “/Volumes/Technology” went down, see). Which seems pretty rubbish to me: can’t this system withstand a loss of network? Sometimes I wonder if some of these apps aren’t so determinedly network-aware that if there’s not a network there they go into a complete tizz.
Doesn’t stop me suspecting I’m going to have to reinstall the whole dawg, though.
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- Get it while it's late: my exclusive review of Tiger (you know.. that new software thing) (2 May 2005; score: 38.43%)
- Late results: two-year-old vs slot-loading Wii drive; adult vs three-headed screw (12 August 2007; score: 33.74%)
- "Tails are cool" (26 October 2005; score: 33.43%)
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June 19th, 2006 at 9:55 pm
I gotta say, my Finder hangs for a bit when it loses its connection to a network drive. Nothing like the problems you’re experiencing, but I do believe that the Finder is hopeless at network drives.
There was that job advert suggesting they might be re-writing it for 10.6, so fingers crossed.
June 19th, 2006 at 10:36 pm
“Charless-PowerBook KernelEventAgent[39]: tid 00000000 found 1 filesystem(s) with problem(s)”, sounds like your filesystem has a problem. I prefer DiskWarrior, but even booting into safe mode and running fsck should help. Haven’t tried TechTool since I transitioned to Mac OS X. Possible your disk drive is failing, too. I had problems exactly like you’re describing on my PBG3 just before its disk died completely. Might be worthwhile to take it to you local Apple Service Provider and have them check it out. The can do a backup before they start working on it. It won’t be cheap, but if your data are important to you …
June 19th, 2006 at 10:36 pm
not to be stupid, but have you tried fsck?
if not, reboot. hold command + S until you see text. release.
at prompt, type fsck -f
if it fixes anything, do it again
type shutdown
power up again
i’ve found occasionally that fsck can fix all kinds of things. i’d also run a hardware test on your RAM. a bad stick could cause bizarro errors, crashes, beach balls of death, etc.
good luck.
June 19th, 2006 at 10:51 pm
I agree with you on upgrade installs. I did my last upgrade install from 10.0 to 10.1. Now I take the opportunity to reformat and start from scratch for each point major release. I don’t know if it makes a difference, but it can’t make it worse.
That said, you can make this process easy on yourself. AS long as you have a big enough drive you can clone it with Carbon Copy Cloner or PsyncX, the do your re-install. Then use the Migration Assistent to transfer all of your User Settings and Applications back to your clean install.
This works great for me, and is as painless as a re-install gets. Plus, it requires no great involvement on your part and you get a bootable back-up out of the deal.
btw… This is the problem I had with my iBook the week before the hard drive gave up the ghost for good. Take care.
June 19th, 2006 at 11:35 pm
Whenever you do an upgrade install, you should remove any 3rd party plugins you have in ~/Library (at least, move them somewhere else) especially InputManagers.
It took me ages to locate a spell-checker that was hosing my system completely.
June 20th, 2006 at 12:41 am
Trobleshooting:
AFTER running all diagnostic, permissions, and disk repair apps…
1. Create a new user and test apps. Does the machine exhibit the same issues? If so disable any 3rd party plug-ins you have installed for “any user”. Tip!!! ALWAYS install ONLY for your primary user so you can test later using another user if needed. Run the installer for each user.
2. Clean out the System level Startup Items etc. TEST.
3. Install and Archive OS - TEST
4. backup users and wipe HD. Reinstall all apps from scratch. There are shortcuts but at this point why bother. You have a serious issues and why not just nip it in the bud.
Good luck!
June 20th, 2006 at 1:02 am
Hi Charles,
Have you tried a really good memory checker? I ask because my first inclination on hearing your problems is that you have a problem with your memory. I’d recommend you run Memtest http://memtestosx.org/ while booted to single user mode. Let it run overnight, and in the morning check to see if you have some bad memory.
That should save a reinstall.
If your memory is good, then I’ll echo Kevin J. Weise above and say give DiskWarrior a spin.
Trevor
June 20th, 2006 at 1:04 am
First off, when you’re having trouble, don’t be so quick to jump to the “I have to reinstall the OS” conclusion. That’s a Windoze user’s response to everything, and has no business in the Mac world.
The problem could definitely be related to the specific applications you are running, as well as the various files which are open within those applications. Also, it could be related to the specific preferences which are setup within those applications - ones regarding background processing, network checks, etc. Upgrades of the OS are not necessary problematic (I’ve been upgrading the OS since the Public Beta), but upgrades of every version of your various applications could be, due to the … questionable upgrade handling on the part of several third-party developers.
The instructions above regarding performing file system check (fsck) are good - but a first step would be to simply run Disk Utility, and see what can be done with the options available to you there. Ideally, boot from a Mac OS X Install Disc, and/or into the Hardware Test partition on such a piece of media, and see if anything results from those checks.
But, if nothing else seems to work, the next thing you need to do is very simple: Create another user, logout as “you”, login as this new user, and try to repeat your behaviors there. If you cannot repeat the problems, you _know_ the issues are related to preferences (as indicated above). Again, the cruft involved in constantly upgrading a user account are much more likely to cause issues, rather than the tested-profusely-by-Apple upgrades to the OS itself. A fresh user account can be quite helpful in showing you just how fast and responsive your same machine, with your same OS load, can be - if you get rid of the myriad of obsolete preferences which might have accumulated.
No matter what, best of luck with resolving what appear to be quite maddening performance issues on your machine. Hopefully some of the suggestions will help, without requiring such a massive investment in time and effort.
June 20th, 2006 at 5:18 am
If you download the appropriate Apple Service Manual (search on the web), you could see how to install a new hard drive. Put your old drive in an exernal firewire case and connect it. Then a fresh install of 10.4 will allow you to transfer all your applications, documents, etc. Hard drive technology changes faster than any other and it’s almost always a good idea to upgrade after a while since you can use the old one as an external and for backups.
June 20th, 2006 at 5:25 am
If you insist on reinstalling Tiger do it this way:
Get a Firewire drive big enough to hold all yur stuff (even if you have to borrow it). Get Carbon Copy Cloner (or somethng similar) and make a clone to the external. Then get your Tiger install disk and do an ERASE and install on the PowerBook. Then use the Apple migration assistant to get your stuff off of the external drive.
I chose this method when I upgraded to Tiger and it worked perfectly. The Panther to Tiger upgrade was ugly and I avoided it. I have had none of the issues so many have had with a conventional Tiger upgrade from Panther. Nor have I had any problems with subsequent upgrades - I am now at 10.4.6
June 20th, 2006 at 7:20 am
Hopefully you havent wiped your drive yet. The upgrade algorithm was greatly improved in Tiger and more or less will lay down a fresh set of files on top of your current install. You’ll lose your sw updates, but this way may save some time in trying to reconstruct your personal files and apps.
June 20th, 2006 at 9:00 am
It might be worth installing Applejack - http://applejack.sourceforge.net. On restart, hold down the ‘Command’ and ‘S’ keys, and you enter the command-line screen into which you can type intructions to Applejack, ‘Applejack’ or ‘Applejack auto restart’ for example. I’ve run Diskwarrior and Applejack before all OS installations (most of them upgrades rather than from fresh), on all types of machines, and have never had a problem. Now if that isn’t tempting fate….
If Diskwarrior and Applejack don’t solve it then I’d use one of the other excellent ideas posted above.
June 20th, 2006 at 2:07 pm
For the future have a small firewire HD with a clean install of the latest system (plain Apple — no third party add-ons) and all of your disk repair apps onboard. Call it “Emergency Boot” or “Doomsday Boot” and keep it tucked away for.. well.. emergencies. This has saved my butt several times.
June 20th, 2006 at 2:41 pm
Hmm, everyone seems to think it’s either (a) disk or (b) RAM trouble.
I don’t think it’s RAM - surely that won’t go bad.
Smartreporter suggests that the disk is fine; it’s SMART verified, if that’s any cause for confidence.
The machine is running fine after another reboot, but I still wonder about it. I do recall seeing something somewhere about lookupd (I think) having serious problems; and something else (at Macfixit? MOSXHints?) about the March of Doom, when all the apps go into “not responding” and won’t come out.
I haven’t done anything yet. Don’t quite see what having a FW drive would do; surely if you’ve got an install disk, you can run a disk utility on it. I guess that’s not DiskWarrior, of course.
Has nobody else had the March of Doom, then, when apps just go off into neverland?
Oh, and the really fun thing - when eventually I got Address Book started again, it had wiped itself. Fortunately I keep backups, but even so…
June 20th, 2006 at 2:52 pm
I agree with Trevor above - it sounds like you have dodgy RAM installed - maybe try removing the new RAM and checking with just the standard amount that was supplied with the machine - I’d be interested to hear how you get on.
Cheers.
June 20th, 2006 at 3:42 pm
Uh? But it’s not new RAM - I’ve had it since I had the machine. I’ve not had any problems until quite recently.
Just did a Disk Utility run, which says:
>>
Verifying volume “Macintosh HD”
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
%)
Nesting of folders has exceeded the recommended limit of 100
Checking Extended Attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
The volume Macintosh HD appears to be OK.
Mounting Disk
1 HFS volume checked
Volume passed verification
Volume needs repair
>>
So has it passed or does it need repair? I’ve asked this before but not been enlightened by the reply.
June 20th, 2006 at 3:46 pm
..and OK, just did a Google on “Nesting of folders has exceeded the recommended limit ot 100″ and found the top result is http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=28421, where the person there found that an app called Vapor had copies of itself inside its Resources folder.
I look in my /Utilities folder.. and there’s Vapor. With a copy of itself inside its Resources folder. (Is that strange, or what?)
In the bin it goes and we’ll try again…
June 20th, 2006 at 4:10 pm
Aha! Without Vapor, with Disk Utility, we get
>>
Verifying volume “Macintosh HD”
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Checking Extended Attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
The volume Macintosh HD appears to be OK.
Mounting Disk
1 HFS volume checked
Volume passed verification
>>
Hurrah! We passed! Now let’s see if the problems continue. Might get Spotlight to de-and re-index my HD, since it was doing /Applications, and Vapor lived there.
Wow, this almost deserves a whole post. In fact..
June 21st, 2006 at 4:16 am
It could be worse, I spent three days re-installing everything on the Macbook Pro (thinking that it was something I had copied across from my G4 when I used the migration assistant) only to find out it was dodgy ram. I agree with those suggesting fsck and double checking the drive, it could be that there are some missing sectors screwing everything up.
June 21st, 2006 at 12:16 pm
How much free disc space do you actually have left? Things can get distinctly thrashy and nonlinear if you don’t have enough…
June 21st, 2006 at 9:12 pm
I’ve got 32GB free (on a 100GB disk) - I don’t think that’s the problem. See my next post, where I think I’ve solved the issue. Perhaps.
(The absence of post 749 - sharp-eyed readers - is because a stray linefeed character copied from the Disk Utility output was making Wordpress puke when I tried to post. Oddly, it was OK to put into a comment like this. Okayyy..)
July 24th, 2006 at 7:58 pm
KernelEventAgent[39]: tid 00000000 found 1 filesystem(s) with problem(s) does not refer to problems with the local file system, but a problem with the remote/mounted filesystem, whose rug was firmly pulled out at an unexpected time. Unfortunately, this is a generic log message, so it’s not really a “problem” with the file system, but a problem talking to a file system that went away.