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random freezing..then death =[


xeraphine
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So I had installed 10.4.9 using uphuck's latest DVD and the installation went smoothly (30 minutes =D). The installation included the patches for the Celeron D processor and the one above that (i can't remember what it was for the life of me...sorry!), no VGA driver, and the intel ve pro/100 driver install. I dual-boot with windows vista using easyBCD for setup, and it works well. Once up, I installed the FX5200 Titan driver, the driver for my wireless card, and rebooted, and after that, it worked absolutely flawlessly. 3rd party programs include firefox, transmission, adium, and pacifist. 1st party programs include iwork 08.

 

So I've been using it for about 2 days, and there had been only one hitch: it locked up once when i tried to close out of transmission (only other program actively running was firefox), and it locked up on me for about 2 minutes untill it cleared up. I quickly forgot about that little hitch and continued using it. Then, last night, I tried to minimize transmission (adium, firefox, and pacifist were actively running) to reduce screen clutter a little and the system hung up on me. this time, however, it didn't go away. So i went to watch some TV, went to bed a little earlier, and when I woke up this morning, it was exactly the same. Nice little busy signal with the mouse, no hard drive activity, nothing. So, being a windows user of more than a decade, I did what I usually did in this case: hard reset. Bad idea.

 

It won't start up again. If i do a normal start-up with verbose mode on, it gives me a "could not set up diskarb session" and "disk1s2 I/O error." So then I booted into the install DVD and verified the drive, and it said that there were minor header issues, so I repaired those. Pretty confident in it now, i restarted again in verbose mode and it gave me "couldn't start application services" along with the "could not set up diskarb session." I had also noticed that the large stream of extension startups before verbose mode had not happened. So I booted into single user mode and tried to fix up the MBR using fdisk -e /dev/rdisk1, and it told me that the MBR didn't exist. Weird. So I erased it, reinit'ed it, updated it, wrote it, and quit out. It gave me the whole "could not get access to disk, restart?" prompt, and I restarted. This time when I rebooted I used -f -v, and it gave me the same error. I tried /sbin/fsck -y, but it wouldn't work out. The only way I could boot back into the system was by rd=disk1s2, but none of the extensions were on, such as network, etc., so it's kinda pointless. I googled for 2 hours this morning, but nothing on the i'nets worked, so I decided to turn to the folks here for help =D

 

So my question to anyone out there who read through all that up there is:

 

1. How can I fix this problem without reinstalling OS X completely?

2. What can I do to prevent such lock-ups in the future, outside of not using transmission?

3. If such lock-ups should occur in the future, how should I handle them, outside of performing another hard reset and getting these errors?

 

Thanks for all your help, guys, cuz this forum has been invaluable!

 

PS - specs

Processor: Celeron D 331 2.66 Ghz, SSE3

RAM: 768 MB DDR RAM

GFX: Nvidia Geforce FX5200, PCI, 256 MB RAM

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what motherboard are you using, and do you know if you have ICH7, ICH8 or ICH9?

 

i'm not sure if you'll be able to fix your install, but i can tell you that you data [as long as your hard drive is not corrupt or damaged] is still there, and accessible. you just need to download a Ubuntu live CD [preferrably 7.04] and boot into the live CD, and you can access your drive and put your data on an external hard drive or flash drive if needed.

 

it might be hard to fix it, so reinstalling might be your best bet. i used the trial of VMWare Workstation to install OSx86, so while i'm in windows, i can actually boot into OSx86 through VMWare, get work done, save it, shut down, and then reboot into OS X, and all i just did is right there. its a route i suggest for all triple booters out there. [i don't necessarily plan on telling my secret to triple booting on a single drive though].

 

i hope all works out for you and you can get any data back that you need, but when a kernel is in that bad shape, generally fixing it is a bad idea.

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I have no idea what mobo I have, but out of those three, I would guess ICH7, since I have nothing but PCI slots. I save all my important data on a backed up external hard drive, so there's nothing to lose. The only thing is that I don't wanna go back and install everything again. Mostly being lazy, that's all =D. If I don't get a definitely fix by the time I get home from work, I'll just re-install. Browsing around the internets, it seems as if firefox has a memory consumption issue on OS X. If I do indeed reinstall, I'll try out camino and see if I get the same problem. If I do, then it's my system. If I don't, then I'm ship-shape. Thanks =D

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put in your DVD, and during the grey apple screen hold down "C" on the keyboard...that should allow you to boot from CD, where you can try a repair or just reinstall.

 

have you tried booting in safe mode?

 

my system used to do the same thing sometimes...i'd just have to turn off the machine and try again after a while...after i did a boot into safe mode, it hasn't done it to me since.

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