startup problems
 

hi,
I have an Ibook, the clamshell silve SE edition with 196? of ram and 20 GB HD.

I have 9.2 and then OSX and now Jaguar installed.. I have never had any problems with my IBOOK.

Well, I recently installed Microsoft Office for OS X and Adobe photoshop for OS x. after i did that , my computer started acting really weird. it was very slow. I have lots of memory left (like 11 GB) so i know its not that.. but the other day i got a message that there was no memory..

so when i went to restart , i'll go to the first white and grey apple screen, and the little dial will start spinning.. then, if i'm LUCKY i'll go to the blue screen and the spinng beach ball (of death) starts spinning... and then nothing happens...

this of course, makes me sad, cause i've always been happy with my IBOOK...

sometimes it goes past the Spinning beach ball (of death- SBBOD for short) and then after I enter my password.. SBBOD returns...

I read somewhere if you do control apple p and R it might help, so i did that and it started in 9.2 and then from there i asked it to start in Jaguar.. it did the same thing as always though...

if someone could please help me out, that would rule...

please help make this sadmacgirl- happy!

thank you!

Reboot, hold down CMD-s, At the prompt type:
[press return]
This will attempt to repair any problems with the file system. If when it ends it says something to the effect of File System Repaired, press the up arrow and hit return. This will run fsck again. Keep running it until there are no errors. Once there are no errors (or if you don't get any the first time), type:
[press return]
I'm sure you can guess what this will do. Just installing Office and Photoshop shouldn't make your computer behave like this. However with only 192 megs of memory, you might struggle a bit. I think that vanilla OS X requires 128 mb of RAM to run. All Office apps and Photoshop require quite a bit of memory to run. When there's not enough physical RAM, then the OS starts using disk space. This slows you down.. If you are running Classic as well.. oi!

That aside, if there's no disk problems, you might want to try and create another test user on there. Try to log into that and see if you get the SBBOD.

YEYYYYY!!!

it worked!!!!!! thank you SOOOOOOOOOOOOO MUCH!!!!!!!!


thankyouthankyouthankyou!!!!!!!

on a side note its wise to run fsck -y several times until it scans completely through with out fixing any errors

i've been having similar problems with a dual-usb 500mhz ibook with 256 ram in it running various versions of 10.2 while the problem occurs.

my issue is that i get kernel panics after using the computer for anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour or two. i can't seem to cause them to happen, it's not a certain thing i do that makes the thing freak out, but it consistently panics or just freezes.

i tried fscking and that did fix some things, but it didn't fix the problem.

also, when i restart the startup chime is sometimes horribly garbled like it's all peaked out and very unhappy. most of the time when this happens during booting the screen never comes on and the computer doesn't boot up (after reading about some screen problems i checked to see if just the backlight on the lcd wasn't working but that was not the case) once i've had it boot after making the wacked out chime though. after restarting a few times it normally works eventually after freezing a few times during startup. then it works for a bit before panicking or freezing.

any thoughts? i'd really like to avoid buying a new ibook after less than two years.

sounds like a kernel panic, you better back up as much as you can cos your hard disc might crash anytime now.

No, that's what i told you. It doesn't just SOUND like a kernel panic, it IS a kernel panic.

i wanna know how to make them stop.

All my info was fortuitously backed up a day or two before the problem got really serious.

i've reformatted and reinstalled OS X.2 multiple times but the problem remains.

thoughts?

If you've reformatted and reinstalled then it's most likely not the system. It's more likely a peripheral, or 3rd party RAM, or an app that you're installing. Look at the kernal panic logs and see if there are any clues in there. Post the most recent on here.

the only things i have plugged into the ibook are power and cat5.

the only RAM i have in it is apple installed straight from them to me. i haven't ever opened it up though i'm about to take the RAM that they put in it out and go with just the built in 128 to see if that helps.

i'm not sure where to find the panic log so i'm going to give you the last few things it says in the directory.error.log file.

it looks like the commmon one is "can't unregister node ~BSD Configuration Files~Local since not registered"

"reference 0 error = -14071"

"unable to register IPC name: "DirectoryService".

"unable to create mach connection: 1103"

it seems that the errors come in pairs, if not all 3 all at once.

i forgot to mention in my post that the only apps i'm installing on the system after reinstalling are safari and/or camino.

the latest one i've only installed safari on but in earlier reformats i had camino as well.

Should be found in /Library/Logs/panic.log

Have you tried zapping the PRAM?

i zapped the PRAM which made it run for longer than normal then it went back to its full-on wackjobbery.

i don't know that i had a panic.log in my library/logs file, but i'll check again.

The startup chime being screwy doesn't instill much confidence in me that it'll be something that you can fix on your own. It might be time to contact your friendly Apple Support folks.

yellow is correct.

there is an almost 100% chance you have bad hardware.

try removing the RAM, and if that doesn't fix things, your only option is hardware repair.

still sad
 

It was working for me for awhile, but now it won't start again,
I fsck'ed it froever, and it never came up completely clean :'(

any other ideas?!?

sadmacgirl:
Invest in more RAM. I'm not 100% sure which model you have, but you should be able to get over 500mb of RAM in there. RAM is cheap. Of course, I've never (seen or) opened a clamshell iBook, so I don't know how complicated it is to put RAM in it. The first iBooks we purchased were in late 2001.

Free up as much disk space as you can. UNIX operating systems require disk space as swap (think virtual memory), and if there's not much there and you don't have a lot of memory, then things are going to slow down.

It might be time to invest in a third party disk utility. DiskWarrior3 (which I've not used but seems to be the favorite on here), or Drive X (which I have used and think sucks). An alternative is to backup, reformat (zeroing all sectors), and reinstall.. which I'm not entirely sure will gain you much.

Finally, you might want to consider the very expensive alternative of investing in a new Mac, but I'd wait 6 months for the G5 line.

Add at least 256MB of RAM. This will get you to 320MB (swap the 128MB for the 256MB and don't touch the hardwired 64MB).

Note - the machine will take up to 576MB of RAM. If you google around, there are a couple of manufacturers that make a rather expensive very low profile 512MB chip that can be just barely squeezed in. If money's no object this is the way to go. If money is important - you will still get a huge benefit with the 256MB chip.

Note2 - RAM prices fluctuate rather wildly. The price that popped up at the time of posting this looked high to me. Shop around.

Hugh

thanks for the insight.

the startup chime was the most frightening part to me as well.

i'll be making a visit to an apple store in chicago in a few weeks (the day before the keynote at WWDC) so i'll see what they have to say.

does anyone have any idea what i should expect to pay to deal with getting it fixed? if it isn't going to be an arm and a leg i'm fine with fixing it but the only reason i haven't replaced it is that a new 15in powerbook hasn't come out yet. the ibook is going to get passed on to my lady-friend, but at this point i almost think it's worth just getting her a new ibook.

opinions are welcome.

thanks for the help.

PappyWappy:
Unknown, because I'm not sure what they'd be fixing. Don't suppose you bought an AppleCare extended warranty on it?

i figured, "whatever, i don't need that! my apple will last forever!"

hmph.

no applecare on that one. . .but on the next one there will be. . .

Bummer. Yeah, this is probably the one time I'll always buy an extended warranty.

Sorry I can't give you a price idea. It really could be cheap, or like you said, it might be cheaper to wait and get a new one.

is it my imagination or did i hear from someone or another that if i take it into the apple store for repair (assuming it isn't something really basic) that there is a flat fee (or a "this'll cost at least THIS much" fee) of something like $250-$300?

i could very well be making this up, but i thought i had heard that somewhere or another.

i guess i should call them instead of posting here about it.

The ram is under the keyboard just like almost all of apple laptops (of the last 3 years at least). Diskwarrior is an awesome product, I have not been able to get my hands on DW3 (cos my company is a bunch of penny pushing cheap skates) but I would assume its great. Installing ram in a clamshell - easy, installing anything else - pain in the arse.

Its hard to say, it could be as simple as resetting the firmware on your ibook, or it could be as nasty as a bad MLB. Now, considering you can purchase a 700Mhz ibook on ebay for abouts 800ish, I would look into replacing it if any major part is needing repalced. Apple does have a tier system, the minimum charge is like 350 or something of the sort. I work for an AASP, so I would recomend having a store do inhouse repairs on it, apple will charge you more.