Generic OS X Troubleshooting List

[hayne]

I agree that using Safe Boot to run 'fsck' has the huge deficiency that you don't see what happened (i.e. what got fixed - or not).

I wonder if 'dmesg' would show the messages from 'fsck' after a Safe Boot?

[WillyT]

Quote: Originally posted by petey 09 Unplug all USB, Firewire devices except Apple mouse. Reboot with everything uninstalled. 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 escpecially aware of USB hubs.

It could be just an unsupported device rather than bad. Support for 3rd party stuff is now really good. But it wasn't as good with 10.1.x and thats still out there.

[Imacer]

What is MxBtDaemon and Retro Run for? They are in my startup libray folder. I would like to know before i trash them. Good or bad idea.

[Imacer]

Quote: Originally posted by petey here's an updated list, with new/changed items in bold. FIRST AID - repair permissions. - check the filesystem. - disable Application Enhancer, if you're running it. - create a new user account, and see if the problem persists there. - remove any StartupItems in /Library/StartupItems/. - unplug all USB, Firewire devices except Apple mouse. - clear system & user caches. - zap PRAM. MORE SERIOUS TROUBLESHOOTING - unplug 3rd Party PCI cards. - reinstall the latest combo updater. - remove any Extensions from /Library/Extensions/. - remove 3rd party Extensions from /System/Library/Extensions. - check the hard drive for bad blocks. - take out 3rd party RAM. - run the Apple hardware diagnostic CD. - reset PMU. - reinstall the system from scratch. - send the machine back to Apple.

[mervTormel]

Imacer, please start a new thread with those questions.

[Craig R. Arko]

Really, truly, start a new thread for dealing with specific questions like those. OK?

[petey]

I think this list is getting close to being ready for prime time. Suggestions and feedback greatly appreciated.

If you think there should be links or more info at certain points, why not try to rewrite the relevent paragraph with that addition? Feel free to try your hand at rewriting anything else too, if you think you can improve on things. And if you see anything that's dead wrong, or misleading, speak now or forever hold your peace.

Also, I'm wondering were this goes up for viewing? As a hint on the non-forum site? And/Or as a fresh thread in these forums? Anywhere else?

--------------------------------------

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 Disable Application Enhancer, if you're running it.
07 Clear system & user caches.
08 Startup in SafeBoot mode, and see if the problem persists there.
09 Unplug all USB, Firewire devices except Apple mouse.
10 Zap PRAM.

MORE SERIOUS TROUBLESHOOTING
11 Reapply the latest combo updater.
12 Unplug 3rd Party PCI cards.
13 Run the Apple hardware diagnostic CD.
14 Check the hard drive for bad blocks.
15 Take out 3rd party RAM.
16 Reset PMU.
17 Reinstall the system from scratch.
18 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. Or you can boot off the OS X Installation CD, run Disk Utility, and select Repair Disk. 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.

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. And 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. 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 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.

07 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.

08 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.

09 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.

10 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.

11 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. Apply the updater, even if your system version number is already up to date. See if this cures the problem.

12 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.

13 Run the Apple hardware diagnostic CD. See if you get any useful information.

14 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. Norton Disk Doctor will 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.

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

16 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.

17 Reinstall the system from scratch. This step is annoying and time consuming, which is why we've saved it for second to last.

18 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.

[tlarkin]

Not bad. Good job on making the list. I would just like to point out that you do not have to ship it back to apple. You can take it to your local AASP (apple authorized service provider).

[Craig R. Arko]

Quote: Originally posted by petey I think this list is getting close to being ready for prime time. Suggestions and feedback greatly appreciated. Also, I'm wondering were this goes up for viewing? As a hint on the non-forum site? And/Or as a fresh thread in these forums? Anywhere else?

I'll bring that up with griffman. I'd like to see a link on the main site and a clean sticky thread here.

[petey]

and i'll repeat...

if any of the many experts out there want to take a few minutes and read the individual step descriptions in detail to fact check and provide feedback and enhancements, now might be a damn good time to do it.

[Craig R. Arko]

I'm sure everyone is doing the best they can. We should give it a week or so before assuming there are no more comments.

Unless there's a publishing deadline looming nobody mentioned?

[yellow]

Hehehe.. You're fired!! Clean out your desk!

[macmath]

This is a very nice list.

I have just a comment or two, perhaps insignificant.

Relating to (02), it might be worthwhile to say to run fsck or the Disk Utility until you get a clean pass as the repair of some problems may uncover other problems. Something like (additions in blue):

Quote: 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 consecutively until you get an error-free pass. Or you can boot off the OS X Installation CD, run Disk Utility, and select Repair Disk consecutively until you get an error-free pass. 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.

The other issue that one might mention is one of a bad pram battery. If the clock is reset to 6:00 pm on December 31st, 1969 (or any one of another of dates), this is likely the cause (less likely it is a bad logic board). Others more knowledgeable than myself will have other symptoms that point to one of these...For instance, I don't know if this would happen with the New World Macs, but with my old Mac, a bad pram battery caused a blank black screen at startup. A bad pram battery is about the only 'wear-and-tear' thing that even the basic user has to replace in a Mac (most users won't need to replace their drive, but the pram battery will eventually go).

[hayne]

Quote: Originally posted by macmath This is a very nice list. I have just a comment or two, perhaps insignificant. Relating to (02), it might be worthwhile to say to run fsck or the Disk Utility until you get a clean pass as the repair of some problems may uncover other problems.

I agree - this is important. We have seen many people who are having some problem (e.g. crashing) who report having done disk repair and it turns out upon later questioning that they ran fsck or Disk Utility and got some messages about overlapped extents or keys out of order etc (things that fsck/Disk Utility cannot repair) and they ignored this, continuing to try to find some other solution to the problem.

I think maybe we need to be emphatic about this in (2) - we need to say that if you have filesystem problems reported by fsck or Disk Utility, then there is no point continuing on down the troubleshooting list. You need to fix your filesystem problems before doing anything else! If fsck/Disk Utility can't fix it, then you need to get some other tool, or else reformat the disk.

[tlarkin]

I think we should include ESD safety guidelines if removing of any internal parts is required. You need to be properly grounded, if some zaps their main logic board while troubleshooting a would be software issue then their problem just got a lot more expensive to fix. Apple has very specific ESD guidlines for their apple desktop certification.

Here are some basic guidelines when removing internal hardware.

1) Generally try to work in an enviroment that has a humidity range of 70% to 90%

2) Make sure you are properly grounded. There are several ways you can do this. One way would be to go to your local computer store and buy a grounding strap. Nowadays you can guy cordless ones that just ground you. However if they do not have those or you don't want to spend lots of $$ you can get the old school plug/aligator clip ones (or how my fellow co-workers call them the roach clip grounders). If you are using one with a cord, make sure your mac is plugged into a grounded circuit, connect the alligator clip to a metal piece of the case, then make sure your bare skin touches metal before you touch any componet.

3) When removing hardware try not to walk around with it. Walking creates static electricity. Place removed parts on or in a ESD safe plastic bag. Try handling each componet with care and try not to touch any pins connectors with your hands. Grasp the componets along the ciruit board edge or by the bracket if its a PCI card.

4) Never use a metal flat head screw driver to pry anything off a circuit board. I know that sounds like an obvious precaution, but believe me I have known a few people to do this.

5) Work area is important as well. Try to work on a flat surface. Try not be near a sink or any kind of liquid. I think you all get the point on this one. Typically top of a desk or table would be ideal.

These are just some basic ideas that I thought of. I am sure there is probably something I missed. Please add to these as we go.

Also mention back up all data ASAP, because when troubleshooting your system you have the possiblity of losing data. I think that should be the first message on this troubleshooting list.

[mbrzostowski]

Quote: Originally posted by petey and i'll repeat... if any of the many experts out there want to take a few minutes and read the individual step descriptions in detail to fact check and provide feedback and enhancements, now might be a damn good time to do it.

I'm not an expert, but I'd like to make some suggestions as a card carrying newbie. I've added links in the text below where I thought they would help, taken a crack at incorporating the above suggestions re: fsck and ESD guidelines and added text to items 04 and 14.

I've had my iMac for only 4 months, but in that time I've learned quit a bit from this forum. This looked like an opportunity to give something back and learn something at the same time. Forgive my presumption if my suggestions are inappropriate.

---

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 Disable Application Enhancer, if you're running it.
07 Clear system & user caches.
08 Startup in SafeBoot mode, and see if the problem persists there.
09 Unplug all USB, Firewire devices except Apple mouse.
10 Zap PRAM.

MORE SERIOUS TROUBLESHOOTING
11 Reapply the latest combo updater.
12 Unplug 3rd Party PCI cards.
13 Run the Apple hardware diagnostic CD.
14 Check the hard drive for bad blocks.
15 Take out 3rd party RAM.
16 Reset PMU.
17 Reinstall the system from scratch.
18 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. 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.

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. And 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 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.

07 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.

08 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.

09 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.

10 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.

11 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.

12 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).

13 Run the Apple hardware diagnostic CD. See if you get any useful information.

14 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.

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

16 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.

17 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.

18 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. (Locate an an Apple Authorized Service Provider.)

[hayne]

mbrzostowski, looks good but you forgot the part about needing to repeat the fsck operation if it finds anything that needed fixing

[mbrzostowski]

Quote: Originally posted by hayne mbrzostowski, looks good but you forgot the part about needing to repeat the fsck operation if it finds anything that needed fixing

Sorry, I was hoping that the Apple Disk Utility/fsck link would cover that. How's this...

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 - be sure to repeat fsck until you get the "The volume <name of volume> appears to be OK" message. 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.

...from my reading of the Apple article you need only repeat the fsck command. Booting from CD and running Disk Utility's Repair Disk does not require you to "repeat until OK". The above assumes that is correct.

[tlarkin]

I am sure at one point a lot of you might have seen a senerio like this. Boot into single user mode and run fsck. It goes through and fixes a few minor things. It says file system modified after you complete it. You run it in an endless loop. I have run fsck about 30 times on a mac and it will say system modified over and over again in an endless loop.

What would we recomend at that point on the troubleshooting list?

I have found fsck to be buggy at times and sometimes it says it fixes things but its obvious it doesn't always work that way.

[tlarkin]

mbrzostowski-

good work on the links thats a nice touch.

Something thats been mentioned several times by several different people on this forum is still not in these steps. I think backing up data should be in there. I also think that disclaimers should be put in where data loss is a possibility. Diskwarrior, as much praise as I give this little utility, still runs a risk of damaging data. I for one have never seen disk warrior do that, but never the less it is a possibility.

Maybe a seperat link on back up suggestions and what would be most important to back up as well. If someone were to want to back up user settings. What directories would they need to back up, if they are using 3rd party drivers, or hacked drivers they should have back ups of those incase they have to wipe the system.

The list looks good to me, I would just suggest some precautions listed to make the user aware of the risks involved. Some risks will be greater than others, but I think there should be a disclaimer.