Generic OS X Troubleshooting List

[Craig R. Arko]

Sorry, I've been swamped here, too. Petey, if you get to it, that'd be much appreciated.

[tlarkin]

Since everyone is busy I wipped this together today during my lunch hour. I have to split this into 3 posts, its too long the forum won't let me post it as one post. Sorry!

Basic Troubleshooting for Mac OS X



Here are some basic troubleshooting steps, to help one better troubleshoot their macintosh computer running OS X. Please make sure you always keep back ups, running some of these steps do put you at risk for data loss. Be mindful of what you need data wise and always keep recent back ups of data you cannot afford to lose. Also please follow ESD guidelines when removing hardware. If you do not feel confident with removing hardware componets out of your computer then do not do it. Another thing is to keep your system up to date. You can always get the latest updates from apple.

When asking for help on these forums please remember to give as much information as possible. List your system specs (cpu, model, amount of RAM, and other peripherals hooked up to the machine, etc.), version of OS, error messages or error logs (copy/paste the error logs on these forums), and list what applications you have running and are trying to use when the problem happens.

ESD safety is important. You do not want to damage any componet when removing it. A few simple guidelines should be understood and followed when working with hardware. You should first go out to your nearest electronics store and buy a grounding strap. You can get ones that will fit around your wrist or ankle. Nowadays you can get fancy ones that do not have a grounding wire, they have some device attached to it that automatically grounds you. I would recommend those for the convience of not having to attach yourself to something. You want to work in an enviroment that has about 70% to 90% humidity. You also want to work on a flat surface. A table or desk would be ideal. Plug your computer into a grounded circuit (three prongs here in the U.S.). Attach your grouding strap to yourself and then attach the other end of it to a metal part of the computer. There is usually some sort of alligator clip at the end of these ESD straps. Then make sure your bare skin also touches metal before touching anything else. Now you should be properly grounded. When removing hardware try not to touch it that much. Handle it by the edges or by the metal bracket if its a PCI card. Once you remove it place it in a static safe bag for electronics.

Here go the basic steps one can take when troubleshooting their macintosh computer system.

[tlarkin]

FIRST AID
01 Restart.
02 Check/fix the filesystem.
03 Make sure you're not running out of free space on the System volume.
04 Repair permissions.
05 Create a new user account, and see if the problem persists there.
06 Check system logs
07 Disable Application Enhancer, if you're running it.
08 Clear system & user caches.
09 Startup in SafeBoot mode, and see if the problem persists there.
10 Startup in Verbose mode
11 Unplug all USB, Firewire devices except Apple mouse.
12 Zap PRAM.

MORE SERIOUS TROUBLESHOOTING
13 Reset system firmware
14 Reapply the latest combo updater.
15 Unplug 3rd Party PCI cards.
16 Run the Apple hardware diagnostic CD.
17 Check the hard drive for bad blocks.
18 Take out 3rd party RAM.
19 Reset PMU.
20 Archive and reinstall the OS
21 Reinstall the system from scratch.
22 Send the machine back to Apple.

01 Restart. - If a restart cures the problem, and the problem doesn't reappear, your troubleshooting work is done. Congratulate yourself on a hard task well done.

02 Check/fix the filesystem. - There are many different ways to do this. If you feel comfortable with the Terminal, you can boot into Single User mode and run fsck. Hold down cmd+S at start up to boot into single user mode. Once you get all the way booted into single user mode type the following code:

/sbin/fsck -y

Make sure you type in the full path (ie have /sbin + /fsck). Or you can boot off the OS X Installation CD, run Disk Utility, and select Repair Disk. (Apple's instructions for Disk Utility and fsck are here.) Or even better, use a 3rd party tool like DiskWarrior or Norton Disk Doctor. These 3rd party tools can fix some kinds of error that the free Apple tools cannot. (But don't ever install the Norton components on your hard drive - just run the tools by booting off the Norton CD.) If there were errors that needed to be fixed, and your software reports that they were all successfully fixed, you may have solved your larger problem. NOTE: If fsck/Disk Utility can't fix your problem, then you need to get some other tool, or reformat the disk, before doing any other troubleshooting. Repeat running fsck until it reports that no errors are found. Sometimes fsck cannot repair some things and you will need to use a third party application like mentioned above.

03 Make sure you're not running out of free space on the System volume. When the system is running out of memory, it needs to write 80MB swapfiles to your hard drive. If your hard drive is already almost full, then the system will bog down into unusability. Keep tabs on how much free space you have on your boot disk by getting info on that disk in the Finder. Alternatively, you can use the excellent freeware DiskSpace application, which will give you a display of free space on your menubar. You should want to have at *least* 500MB to 1GB of free space at all times. Realistically you would want more than that, especially if you plan on burning CD/DVD's. A good idea to have is always keep about 10% of your hard disk free. Remember that even if you have more free space than this when you first booted, swapfiles can eat up diskspace quickly. If you want to see how many swapfiles you've made that are eating up your disk space, go into the terminal and type: ls /var/vm if you have 10 or 15 swapfiles, that can be well over 1GB of disk space that has disappeared since you first booted. To fix: trash unneeded files and applications off of your System volume to free space. And try to create fewer swapfiles by adding more RAM or running fewer applications simultaneously.

04 Repair permissions. Run this in Disk Utility in your normal login. Open Disk Utility in the Applications/Utilities folder. Select the boot drive (probably "Macintosh HD"), click on the First Aid tab and click the Repair Permissions button. See if this cures the problem.

05 Create a new user account, and see if the problem persists there. You do this by creating a new user in the Accounts tab of System Preferences, logging out of your main account, and logging into the new account. If this makes the problem go away, it means the cause is in your user account. While it's good that we know approximately where the problem is, unfortunately there's a lot of stuff in the user account to pick through. And now you will have to do some serious troubleshooting. Oftentimes, this will be a preferences file in ~/Library/Preferences/. If you can pinpoint that one bad file, you're done. If you have no idea what's going on you can try the laborious process of keeping that new account you made, and bringing over the files one by one until you find the one that was the problem. Even easier is to ask an expert if it's a frequently seen problem, first letting them know that it was a problem in your user account.

06 Check your error logs. Check your system logs to see if there is anything relevant to your problem listed there. To do so simply go to the apple menu and select about this computer. A window will pop up displaying some basic information about your computer. Click on the more info button at the bottom of the window. This will bring up Apple System Profiler (ASP). The last tab furthest to the right of the ASP will be labled “Logs” click on it and then select console. It should list error messages related to each application you are having problems with. Another way you could do this is, wait for you computer to error out, then immediately check the system log from /var/log from the terminal. Once your system errors, or something crashes launch your terminal from /applications/utilities. Once the terminal is loaded use the following code:

tail -50 /var/log/system.log | more

This will display the last 50 lines of your system log. You can play with the -50 number is you need more or less lines. If you do not understand any of the error messages you are getting post them on a forum and see if anyone else can help you. Copying and pasting is a real handy tool to use when using these forums.

07 Disable Application Enhancer, if you're running it. Haxies from Unsanity. They're great, and they're pretty well programmed, but they're hacking the system in non-standard ways. Unsanity claims that APE will be disabled by holding down the shift key while logging in. However, if you want to be ultra-safe about it, download the APE installer from Unsanity and use the 'uninstaller' option to remove all traces.

08 Clear system & user caches. Use a 3rd party tool like Cocktail or Jaguar Cache Cleaner to deep clean all caches. Reboot. See if this cures the problem.

09 Startup in SafeBoot mode, and see if the problem persists there. You do this by holding down the shift key during bootup. If this makes the problem disappear, then it is a problem with Extensions or StartupItems. And most likely, those would be 3rd party Extensions or StartupItems. Most of those are kept in /Library/Extensions/ and /Library/StartupItem/. Move those items to the desktop, and see if you can isolate which one was causing the trouble. There are also some 3rd party extensions that are *annoyingly* installed in /System/Library/Extension/, however you must be very very careful mucking around in there, as almost all of those Extensions are supplied by Apple, and your machine will not function without them. Use common sense, and ask the experts.

10 Start your system in verbose mode. Start up your computer in verbose mode, hold down cmd+V at start up. You will see the a bunch of text scroll down the screen as everything starts up. Look for anything that gives an error message and record it. Try doing google searches, or search http://www.macosxhints.com forums to see if the problem has already been discussed and a known fix has been established. A lot of times you can find fixes on these forums, they are a great tool.

[tlarkin]

11 Unplug all USB, Firewire devices except Apple mouse. Reboot with everything unplugged. If this makes the problem go away, then you have a bad external device, bad cable, or bad port on your computer. Try to isolate which one it is. Be especially wary of USB hubs.

12 Zap PRAM. Hold Down the Command, Option, P, and R keys as you restart the computer, and keep them held down until the computer chimes 3 times. See if this cures the problem.

13 Reset Firmware. Resetting your firmware will reset all firmware settings back to factory defaults. Things like the boot rom, power management, etc. are found in the firmware. To do this hold down the following buttons on your keyboard at boot up: cmd+opt+O+F. Once in open firmware type these commands.

reset-nvram (hit enter)
reset-all (hit enter once more, the system should reboot)

This will successfully reset all firmware on your macintosh computer

14 Reapply the latest combo updater. Download the latest OS X updater from Apple. These updaters come in 2 flavors, an updater which will only update the next most recent version of the OS, and a combo updater, which will update all versions since the last paid update. You want the combo updater. It will be labeled as the combo updater, and it will be much larger than the normal updaters - around 80MB at this time. (Find the updater on the Apple Downloads page.) Apply the updater, even if your system version number is already up to date. See if this cures the problem.

15 Unplug 3rd Party PCI cards. If this solves the problem, replace the cards one by one until you identify the problematic card. Contact the manufacturer to see if updated drivers are available.

NOTE: Be careful to follow the directions that come with your Mac for accessing internal components, particularly with regards to protecting against Electro Static Discharge (ESD).

16 Run the Apple hardware diagnostic CD. Boot off the CD by placing the CD in your optical drive and hold down the C key on the keyboard at start up. See if you get any useful information.

17 Check the hard drive for bad blocks. One way of doing this is to try to re-initialize your drive using Drive Setup from the OS X Installation disk. Unfortunately, this will wipe out all of your data, so back up first, if that's the route you go. If the initialization fails, your disk is worthless garbage and must be replaced. You can use the TechTool Deluxe CD that came with the Apple Protection Plan to check for bad blocks. Norton Disk Doctor will also allow you to test for bad blocks without erasing your disk using the Check Media option. Other 3rd party disk utilities may allow this as well. Hearing odd noises coming from your drive is a tip-off that this may be your trouble.

18 Take out 3rd party RAM. See if this cures the problem.

19 Reset PMU. The PMU's location, and how to reset it, varies by machine. Go to the Apple website to find out how to do it for your particular machine. See if this cures the problem. Typically this will fix issues when your system will not power on. Make sure you only hold in the PMU button for a second. DO NOT hold it in for any longer and DO NOT press it more than once. If you do this it could result in corrupting the PMU itself. You can go to http://support.info.apple.com to search on documentation on how to do this. NOTE* each model of computer will be slightly different.

20 Archive and install OS X. This will archive user/network settings and replace your current system folder with a new one. Boot off your OS X cd and run through the install as normal. Once you get to the screen where you select which hard drive you want to put the OS on there should be an options button under the hard drive. Select it and then select the archive and reinstall button. Then proceed through the install as normal. This may or may not fix your problem, and it can save you time from copying back ups back over, resetting user preferences, and reinstalling applications.

21 Reinstall the system from scratch. This step is annoying and time consuming, which is why we've saved it for second to last. Apple's instructions for doing this can be found here.

22 Send the machine back to Apple. This step is very annoying, very time-consuming, and if the machine is out of warranty, can be very very expensive. So try a couple of the other steps first. Talk to the technician before commiting to a service center. (Locate an an Apple Authorized Service Provider.)

Some of the links were broken I did not have time to add all the HTML tags - sorry!

Whadda think? Needs more improvement? Did I miss anything, I was eating a bean burrito while doing this.

[tlarkin]

Okay fixed a few things, but still had to break it up into multiple posts to get it all to fit. Maybe an admin of the site can copy/paste it into one post in a different thread eventually.

Basic Troubleshooting for Mac OS X



Here are some basic troubleshooting steps, to help one better troubleshoot their macintosh computer running OS X. Please make sure you always keep back ups, running some of these steps do put you at risk for data loss. Be mindful of what you need data wise and always keep recent back ups of data you cannot afford to lose. Also please follow ESD guidelines when removing hardware. If you do not feel confident with removing hardware componets out of your computer then do not do it. Another thing is to keep your system up to date. You can always get the latest updates from apple.

When asking for help on these forums please remember to give as much information as possible. List your system specs (cpu, model, amount of RAM, and other peripherals hooked up to the machine, etc.), version of OS, error messages or error logs (copy/paste the error logs on these forums), and list what applications you have running and are trying to use when the problem happens.

ESD safety is important. You do not want to damage any componet when removing it. A few simple guidelines should be understood and followed when working with hardware. You should first go out to your nearest electronics store and buy a grounding strap. You can get ones that will fit around your wrist or ankle. Nowadays you can get fancy ones that do not have a grounding wire, they have some device attached to it that automatically grounds you. I would recommend those for the convience of not having to attach yourself to something. You want to work in an enviroment that has about 70% to 90% humidity. You also want to work on a flat surface. A table or desk would be ideal. Plug your computer into a grounded circuit (three prongs here in the U.S.). Attach your grouding strap to yourself and then attach the other end of it to a metal part of the computer. There is usually some sort of alligator clip at the end of these ESD straps. Then make sure your bare skin also touches metal before touching anything else. Now you should be properly grounded. When removing hardware try not to touch it that much. Handle it by the edges or by the metal bracket if its a PCI card. Once you remove it place it in a static safe bag for electronics.

Here go the basic steps one can take when troubleshooting their macintosh computer system.

FIRST AID
01 Restart.
02 Check/fix the filesystem.
03 Make sure you're not running out of free space on the System volume.
04 Repair permissions.
05 Create a new user account, and see if the problem persists there.
06 Check system logs
07 Disable Application Enhancer, if you're running it.
08 Clear system & user caches.
09 Startup in SafeBoot mode, and see if the problem persists there.
10 Startup in Verbose mode
11 Unplug all USB, Firewire devices except Apple mouse.
12 Zap PRAM.

MORE SERIOUS TROUBLESHOOTING
13 Reset system firmware
14 Reapply the latest combo updater.
15 Unplug 3rd Party PCI cards.
16 Run the Apple hardware diagnostic CD.
17 Check the hard drive for bad blocks.
18 Take out 3rd party RAM.
19 Reset PMU.
20 Archive and reinstall the OS
21 Reinstall the system from scratch.
22 Send the machine back to Apple.

01 Restart. - If a restart cures the problem, and the problem doesn't reappear, your troubleshooting work is done. Congratulate yourself on a hard task well done.

02 Check/fix the filesystem. - There are many different ways to do this. If you feel comfortable with the Terminal, you can boot into Single User mode and run fsck. Hold down cmd+S at start up to boot into single user mode. Once you get all the way booted into single user mode type the following code:

/sbin/fsck -y

Make sure you type in the full path (ie have /sbin + /fsck). Or you can boot off the OS X Installation CD, run Disk Utility, and select Repair Disk. (Apple's instructions for Disk Utility and fsck are http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214.) Or even better, use a 3rd party tool like DiskWarrior (http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/index.html) or Norton Disk Doctor (http://www.symantec.com/nu/nu_mac/). These 3rd party tools can fix some kinds of error that the free Apple tools cannot. (But don't ever install the Norton components on your hard drive - just run the tools by booting off the Norton CD.) If there were errors that needed to be fixed, and your software reports that they were all successfully fixed, you may have solved your larger problem. NOTE: If fsck/Disk Utility can't fix your problem, then you need to get some other tool, or reformat the disk, before doing any other troubleshooting. Repeat running fsck until it reports that no errors are found. Sometimes fsck cannot repair some things and you will need to use a third party application like mentioned above.

03 Make sure you're not running out of free space on the System volume. When the system is running out of memory, it needs to write 80MB swapfiles to your hard drive. If your hard drive is already almost full, then the system will bog down into unusability. Keep tabs on how much free space you have on your boot disk by getting info on that disk in the Finder. Alternatively, you can use the excellent freeware DiskSpace (http://www.mysterysoftware.com) application, which will give you a display of free space on your menubar. You should want to have at *least* 500MB to 1GB of free space at all times. Realistically you would want more than that, especially if you plan on burning CD/DVD's. A good idea to have is always keep about 10% of your hard disk free. Remember that even if you have more free space than this when you first booted, swapfiles can eat up diskspace quickly. If you want to see how many swapfiles you've made that are eating up your disk space, go into the terminal and type: ls /var/vm if you have 10 or 15 swapfiles, that can be well over 1GB of disk space that has disappeared since you first booted. To fix: trash unneeded files and applications off of your System volume to free space. And try to create fewer swapfiles by adding more RAM or running fewer applications simultaneously.

04 Repair permissions. Run this in Disk Utility in your normal login. Open Disk Utility in the Applications/Utilities folder. Select the boot drive (probably "Macintosh HD"), click on the First Aid tab and click the Repair Permissions button. See if this cures the problem.

05 Create a new user account, and see if the problem persists there. You do this by creating a new user in the Accounts tab of System Preferences, logging out of your main account, and logging into the new account. If this makes the problem go away, it means the cause is in your user account. While it's good that we know approximately where the problem is, unfortunately there's a lot of stuff in the user account to pick through. And now you will have to do some serious troubleshooting. Oftentimes, this will be a preferences file in ~/Library/Preferences/. If you can pinpoint that one bad file, you're done. If you have no idea what's going on you can try the laborious process of keeping that new account you made, and bringing over the files one by one until you find the one that was the problem. Even easier is to ask an expert if it's a frequently seen problem, first letting them know that it was a problem in your user account.

06 Check your error logs. Check your system logs to see if there is anything relevant to your problem listed there. To do so simply go to the apple menu and select about this computer. A window will pop up displaying some basic information about your computer. Click on the more info button at the bottom of the window. This will bring up Apple System Profiler (ASP). The last tab furthest to the right of the ASP will be labled “Logs” click on it and then select console. It should list error messages related to each application you are having problems with. Another way you could do this is, wait for you computer to error out, then immediately check the system log from /var/log from the terminal. Once your system errors, or something crashes launch your terminal from /applications/utilities. Once the terminal is loaded use the following code:

tail -50 /var/log/system.log | more

This will display the last 50 lines of your system log. You can play with the -50 number is you need more or less lines. If you do not understand any of the error messages you are getting post them on a forum and see if anyone else can help you. Copying and pasting is a real handy tool to use when using these forums.

07 Disable Application Enhancer, if you're running it. Haxies from Unsanity. They're great, and they're pretty well programmed, but they're hacking the system in non-standard ways. Unsanity claims that APE will be disabled by holding down the shift key while logging in. However, if you want to be ultra-safe about it, download the APE installer from Unsanity and use the 'uninstaller' option to remove all traces.

[tlarkin]

08 Clear system & user caches. Use a 3rd party tool like Cocktail or Jaguar Cache Cleaner to deep clean all caches. Reboot. See if this cures the problem. Both of these applications can be found at http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/index.shtml

09 Startup in SafeBoot mode, and see if the problem persists there. You do this by holding down the shift key during bootup. If this makes the problem disappear, then it is a problem with Extensions or StartupItems. And most likely, those would be 3rd party Extensions or StartupItems. Most of those are kept in /Library/Extensions/ and /Library/StartupItem/. Move those items to the desktop, and see if you can isolate which one was causing the trouble. There are also some 3rd party extensions that are *annoyingly* installed in /System/Library/Extension/, however you must be very very careful mucking around in there, as almost all of those Extensions are supplied by Apple, and your machine will not function without them. Use common sense, and ask the experts.

10 Start your system in verbose mode. Start up your computer in verbose mode, hold down cmd+V at start up. You will see the a bunch of text scroll down the screen as everything starts up. Look for anything that gives an error message and record it. Try doing google searches, or search http://www.macosxhints.com forums to see if the problem has already been discussed and a known fix has been established. A lot of times you can find fixes on these forums, they are a great tool.

11 Unplug all USB, Firewire devices except Apple mouse. Reboot with everything unplugged. If this makes the problem go away, then you have a bad external device, bad cable, or bad port on your computer. Try to isolate which one it is. Be especially wary of USB hubs.

12 Zap PRAM. Hold Down the Command, Option, P, and R keys as you restart the computer, and keep them held down until the computer chimes 3 times. See if this cures the problem.

13 Reset Firmware. Resetting your firmware will reset all firmware settings back to factory defaults. Things like the boot rom, power management, etc. are found in the firmware. To do this hold down the following buttons on your keyboard at boot up: cmd+opt+O+F. Once in open firmware type these commands.

reset-nvram (hit enter)
reset-all (hit enter once more, the system should reboot)

This will successfully reset all firmware on your macintosh computer

14 Reapply the latest combo updater. Download the latest OS X updater from Apple. These updaters come in 2 flavors, an updater which will only update the next most recent version of the OS, and a combo updater, which will update all versions since the last paid update. You want the combo updater. It will be labeled as the combo updater, and it will be much larger than the normal updaters - around 80MB at this time. (Find the updater on http://www.info.apple.com/support/download.html.) Apply the updater, even if your system version number is already up to date. See if this cures the problem.

15 Unplug 3rd Party PCI cards. If this solves the problem, replace the cards one by one until you identify the problematic card. Contact the manufacturer to see if updated drivers are available.

NOTE: Be careful to follow the directions that come with your Mac for accessing internal components, particularly with regards to protecting against Electro Static Discharge (ESD).

[tlarkin]

16 Run the Apple hardware diagnostic CD. Boot off the CD by placing the CD in your optical drive and hold down the C key on the keyboard at start up. See if you get any useful information.

17 Check the hard drive for bad blocks. One way of doing this is to try to re-initialize your drive using Drive Setup from the OS X Installation disk. Unfortunately, this will wipe out all of your data, so back up first, if that's the route you go. If the initialization fails, your disk is worthless garbage and must be replaced. You can use the TechTool Deluxe CD that came with the Apple Protection Plan to check for bad blocks. Norton Disk Doctor will also allow you to test for bad blocks without erasing your disk using the Check Media option. Other 3rd party disk utilities may allow this as well. Hearing odd noises coming from your drive is a tip-off that this may be your trouble.

18 Take out 3rd party RAM. See if this cures the problem.

19 Reset PMU. The PMU's location, and how to reset it, varies by machine. Go to the Apple website to find out how to do it for your particular machine. See if this cures the problem. Typically this will fix issues when your system will not power on. Make sure you only hold in the PMU button for a second. DO NOT hold it in for any longer and DO NOT press it more than once. If you do this it could result in corrupting the PMU itself. You can go to http://support.info.apple.com to search on documentation on how to do this. NOTE* each model of computer will be slightly different.

20 Archive and install OS X. This will archive user/network settings and replace your current system folder with a new one. Boot off your OS X cd and run through the install as normal. Once you get to the screen where you select which hard drive you want to put the OS on there should be an options button under the hard drive. Select it and then select the archive and reinstall button. Then proceed through the install as normal. This may or may not fix your problem, and it can save you time from copying back ups back over, resetting user preferences, and reinstalling applications.

21 Reinstall the system from scratch. This step is annoying and time consuming, which is why we've saved it for second to last. Apple's instructions for doing this can be found here http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=42929~.

22 Send the machine back to Apple. This step is very annoying, very time-consuming, and if the machine is out of warranty, can be very very expensive. So try a couple of the other steps first. Talk to the technician before commiting to a service center. (Locate an an Apple Authorized Service Provider by clicking here http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=3464)

[tlarkin]

Okay got some more free time so I fixed it up. If anyone wants to add anything please do.

[Blue Chipmunk]

Hi, my problem is that my computer won't shut down, it always restarts. I checked the error logs yesterday, and my computer shut down properly twice. Then the problem resurfaced.

I got this. (I pressed the power button and held it to shut it down, and a couple hours later i've now checked the error logs again:

[localhost:~] shawn% tail -50 /var/log/system.log | more
Oct 19 19:14:16 localhost mach_kernel: AppleSCCModem(1450380): setPowerState is
called -- powerStateOrdinal = 0
Oct 19 19:14:16 localhost mach_kernel: USBF: 18.166 AppleUSBMouse[0x14f7e00]
::start - USB Generic Mouse @ 4 (0x2120000)
Oct 19 19:14:16 localhost mach_kernel: ATIRage128: using AGP
Oct 19 19:14:16 localhost mach_kernel: USBF: 19.556 AppleUSBProKbd[0x140b200
]::start AppleUSBProKeyboard @ 3 (0x2110000)
Oct 19 19:14:16 localhost mach_kernel: 96008000: VRAM found 96000000:00800000
Oct 19 19:14:16 localhost mach_kernel: ATY,Rage128k: i2cPower 0
Oct 19 19:14:16 localhost mach_kernel: .Display_Rage128-0101800f EDID Version 1.
1
Oct 19 19:14:16 localhost mach_kernel: Vendor/product 0x610/0x9d03, Est: 0x00,
0x02, 0x00,
Oct 19 19:14:16 localhost mach_kernel: Std: 0x0101, 0x0101, 0x0101, 0x0101, 0x0
101, 0x0101, 0x0101, 0x0101,
Oct 19 19:14:16 localhost mach_kernel: .Display_Rage128-0101800f: user ranges nu
m:1 start:96008000 size:300080
Oct 19 19:14:16 localhost mach_kernel: .Display_Rage128-0101800f: using (1024x76
8@75Hz,32 bpp)
Oct 19 19:14:16 localhost mach_kernel: UniNEnet: Ethernet address 00:30:65:56:a6
:ce
Oct 19 19:14:16 localhost mach_kernel: ether_ifattach called for en
Oct 19 19:14:16 localhost mach_kernel: Root power domain receiving initial prefe
more


Can someone make sense of this/see if there is a problem?

[tlarkin]

Blue chipmunk, please start a new thread for your problem.

[Blue Chipmunk]

Sorry. I only posted it here because I tried out step 6.

[petey]

I might have some free time to write this up with everyone's contributions.

But before I do:

---

Any changes due to Panther?

is fsck changed? or anything else in the list?

---

ALSO...

what's the final word on this topic:

if the user Resets the NVRAM, doesn't that mean they don't have to also Zap PRAM?

[yellow]

Quote: Originally posted by petey is fsck changed? or anything else in the list?

Since Panther is journaled by default, you'll have to do /sbin/fsck -fy (-f is force).

[petey]

Quote: Originally posted by petey what's the final word on this topic: if the user Resets the NVRAM, doesn't that mean they don't have to also Zap PRAM?

never mind.

tlarkin answers this above.

[Craig R. Arko]

Quote: Originally posted by petey what's the final word on this topic: if the user Resets the NVRAM, doesn't that mean they don't have to also Zap PRAM?

Unfortunately, the final words seem to be: "It depends...".

Thanks again for your effort on this! Sorry I've been a slug lately.

[petey]

Quote: Originally posted by Craig R. Arko Unfortunately, the final words seem to be: "It depends...".

hmmm... i'm taking that to mean that PRAM is a subset of NVRAM. in other words, reset the NVRAM and don't worry about zapping the PRAM.

you have reason to suspect this isn't true?

Quote: Thanks again for your effort on this! Sorry I've been a slug lately.

i've been the one who's been sluggish on this lately. but let me try to punch something together now.

[anthlover]

Pram and NVRAM resets are supposed to be equivalnt if Zapping the Pram works

And is supposed to be equivlant to Open Firmware Reset of reset-all ??

Starting up in open firmware seems to give more time and choices of resets and to be preferred in those cases where the former does not seem to work.

[xSmurf]

"Check that you are not running out of space on the system drive"

I would like to add that if you have your iTunes library set to another drive and that this drive is low on space (usually <100Mb) it will also cause crashes just like if the system's drive was. Personnal experience, hope it helps

[jbreazeale]

The URL in this step is in error. Here's a correction.

21 Reinstall the system from scratch. This step is annoying and time consuming, which is why we've saved it for second to last. Apple's instructions for doing this can be found here.

[petey]

Published as a hint on the main site:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...04011205473937