[veryniceguy2002]

Can all those experts help me on this, before I send my G3 to the expensive Apple dealer to repair it

I have just noticed my B&W G3 400MHz behave strangely (only happened last night). The system (10.1.4) somehow periodic hangs for about 7 seconds (everything except the pointer freezes), and then repeat again around every 30-60 seconds or so (it seems it varies, and after 2 hours of display screen saver, it seems it doesn't freeze until after I wake from the screen saver...)

I run top on a terminal to see if there is any process which causes the hang, and I cannot see any process which hong the systems. However, I noticed the system load jump to anything from 12 to 20 after every freezes, and then graduatelly drop it back to around 0.6 before the next freeze.

I reboot the system with my Drive 10 CD (which I think it's a 10.2 CD), the freeze continues. I ran diagnose on my SCSI hard drive, butI cannot see anything wrong with it. (So it seems it's nothing to do with my hard drive)

I got a feeling it might be possibly related to the CPU or the RAM that I had on my machine. Can someone tell me is there anything that I can do to investigate further before I have to take it to the expensive Apple dealer to repair (if this is just caused by a faulty RAM modules I don't want to take it to the repairer and get a hugh repair bill only to find this out...)??? Does anyone know what might happened to my G3??

Please please pelase... can someone out there help me please!

[Cipher13]

How many hard drives do you have?

If it was the RAM, things would just die. Same with CPU. Do you hear the hard drive make funny sounds every now and then? Sounds like a HD, but it could be the ATA controller. They were a bit buggy. If you have two drives...

Upgrade to 10.2?

[veryniceguy2002]

Originally posted by Cipher13:
How many hard drives do you have?

If it was the RAM, things would just die. Same with CPU. Do you hear the hard drive make funny sounds every now and then? Sounds like a HD, but it could be the ATA controller. They were a bit buggy. If you have two drives...

Upgrade to 10.2?

Only one hard drive, and it is a SCSI hard drive come with my G3 from Apple's factory with the original SCSI card (i.e. no IDE/ATA hard drive in my G3).

I cannot hear any funny noise from the hard drive (It's a relatively quiet IBM hard drive!) But the thing is, I have booted my G3 with a Drive 10 CD (with is a stripped down version of 10.2), so that it shouldn't depend on the hard drive much for swap space or system files, yet I can still observe the freeze... And I run the Drive 10 diagnoses and I cannot see any problem (other than volume record not correct; but then I fixed it but the problem still presists )

Are you saying it might be the SCSI controller's problem?

[D'Espice]

I think that something tries to access something periodically. Mostly, freezes like that are caused by a process trying to access the CD-ROM. You should try to disconnect the CD-ROM and boot up OS X, maybe that'll fix the problem and you'll need a new CD-ROM.

It might as well be the SCSI controller acting weird, I don't know why you still have SCSI anyway. You should think - in case it's either the CD-ROM or the SCSI controller - about selling all your SCSI-stuff and getting a cheap 40 GB IDE-drive and an IDE CD-RW or Pioneer A05 DVD-burner.

[reader50]

D'Espice beat me out the gate. Writing goes slow sometimes.

Pauses happen when the CPU is paying almost exclusive attention to something. This isn't supposed to happen much in OSX because of the preemptive multitasking. It can still happen if you hit a bug in OSX, or if a hardware interrupt is calling for attention.

If it's an OSX glitch, upgrading to 10.2.x would likely fix it.

If it's a hardware problem, it could be a drive calling for attention, or the network calling for attention. Try pulling the power plug from the optical drive (with the system shut down of course). It doesn't have to be the HD that is calling for attention, and it's more convenient to eliminate the optical drive as a suspect first, than to disconnect the HD.

Alternatively, if your PowerMac thinks it's getting paged from a network, go into Network Prefs Pane and turn your Ethernet jack off. See if the pauses stop.

And Cipher's right of course, it could be the driver card (or a termination/cable issue).

[tooki]

If you have an internal zip drive, try disconnecting it and see if that helps.

I've seen this behavior on my blue G3 in OS 9. It doesn't happen on mine in OS X, but anything's possible...

tooki

[veryniceguy2002]

Originally posted by tooki:
If you have an internal zip drive, try disconnecting it and see if that helps.

I've seen this behavior on my blue G3 in OS 9. It doesn't happen on mine in OS X, but anything's possible...

tooki

No, no ZIP drive or anything like that. Only a SCSI hard drive and CD-ROM drive.

Strange thing is that I didn't turn on my G3 again until last night, and there's nothing wrong now

Thanks for everyone for the suggestions. Lets hope my G3 would be problem free for another 10 years