OS X - Startup problem!

[benlhoward]

I have recently installed a copy on os x on my g4 (450mhz, 640mb ram, 20gb hd) at work. All was running fine when i had to download the pasteboard xtension for quark 5. I thought the machine was taking its time to 'unstuff' the file and when it had finished there was nothing to be seen! so i restarted the machine and thats when i got this message:

"You need to restart your machine"

It was in several different languages also.

So i restarted the machine and the same message came up. I tried again and exactly the same happened.

I ran disk utility but that didn't seem to be-able to repair the disk fully.

Wat do i do now?

Thanks.

[goodolebwinches]

Look, I don't know what your machine's problem is...but I can tell you that I went through it too. Mine was with the program "Final Cut Express". All was well, but once I started adding video every once in a while it would do the crash screen with the need-to-restart message. I purchased a third party disk tool and haven't had the problem since. I'm not saying that your problem is the same as mine, but I now believe that even MAC hard drives need a little defragging/updated directory at times. I used "Diskwarrior 3" and it seemed to help right from the start.

[benlhoward]

Thanks for the advice and i'll porbably look into a third party disk tool.

[Graphite]

Did the screen go grey? pretty much a lock up?

That would be a kernel panic. Not pretty but nothing to worry about if you get on once or twice.
I get kernel panics only when I run Speed Download and I download a program and have more connections running than the server can handle and some how that screws with my machine and so I keep the bandwidth low unless I know the server can handle it.

[benlhoward]

Yeah the screen was grey and it had frozen.

The only problem i had was everytime i re-started it kept going to that screen! i couldn't get rid of it!!!

Thanks.

[nko]

Why do I hear about so many ways to panic the kernel? I feel like a troll saying this, as I do love my Mac, but I only ever got maybe one or two kernel panics in Linux, from which I switched to MacOS. Already I've gotten three, and it hasn't been two months. And now it's routinely taking up of 5-7 minutes to boot the machine (probably because it's freezing up so often and I have to hard reset it). I'm guessing that time would go down if I enabled journalling.

EDIT: Although it bears mentioning, non-OS programs in MacOS don't seem to crash as much as in Linux. Just my experience.

[Murlyn]

This is interesting.. I've had my powerbook g4 for over a year and a half now and I have never had a kernel panic.. and I do everything with this system.. what am I doing right? or wrong? I dont mind at all, but it's just strange that I do not have any of these problems...

[nko]

I've heard of Windows XP never crashing on people, so stranger things have happened Kernel panics have only happened to me twice when I was doing nothing noteworthy at all (surfing with Safari, Mail in the background, though the SETI@HOME thing was running in the background) and once while doing the standard updates. For that last one, I think it's acceptable for a system to be temporarily unstable if it's being both used and updated at the same time. So it's not like it's a BAD track record. It's not like XP getting crufty after 2 months of light use, then crashing regularly on regular or irregular apps. Or hanging while I'm just moving the mouse. Or... etc.

I should note I don't think XP's a bad OS... but as I sit here, I wonder why I have that opinion...

[Murlyn]

Interesting.. well I have heard that SETI has caused problems in the past so maybe that is the reason, since I have most definitely done the rest that you have described.. over and over and over and.. well you get the point

[nko]

Actually, here's a little update- my mac's been freezing a little more often lately when I let SoftwareUpdate run. If I come back hours later (twice it was days later), it wont come out of sleep mode. I'm gonna run the hardware test, but I think the lockups I've been getting might be related to SoftwareUpdate.

[Graphite]

I do notice kernel panics, but i bring them upon myself, If I wanted to run my mac with out a single kernel panic I could do it, but it would just take me more time... I push my imac to its extreme and if I can feel it correctly sometimes I can quit an app before it panics.. (it kinda studders for a second, and its slower, or the app unexpectedly quits, thats a sign to restart for me)