Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

AdvocateUK · Sep 18, 2003, 03:50 AM

Hi all,

As you may remember I am the new proud owner of a G4 1.25 DP PowerMac.

Since receiving the Mac I have taken the standard 256megs of RAM out and replaced it with 1gig of Corsair PC3200 ram (with no problems)

Although initially I had a few problems getting my Sony DRU500A DVD writer to work I can happily report that yesterday I achieved this with the hacked device plugin.....or so I thought.

This morning when switching the Mac on it crashed as soon as I logged in....after a restart I managed to launch Safari before it crashed.....yet another restart and it lasted a bit longer before again crashing. After that time I had to go and get our baby off to bed for a sleep so the Mac was left at the login screen for a good 20 mins. When I've come back to it I have logged in and everything seems fine....weird or traceable?

The crashes were all the same, the machine would just freeze with no error message. One time I had just tried to launch iTunes and the icon did keep bouncing for a while but eventually stopped.

Any ideas anyone?

TIA

Alistair

Link · Sep 18, 2003, 03:59 AM

No computer needs to warm up. If anything it could be a CPU problem that needs to be addressed.

AdvocateUK · Sep 18, 2003, 04:04 AM

AARGH! Scratch what I was saying about needing to warm up....it just froze on me again :s

AdvocateUK · Sep 18, 2003, 04:07 AM

Seems fine again after a reboot....I should point out that prior to installing the sony writer I had no crashes whatsoever....can't see how it would lock up so randomly though :s

Link · Sep 18, 2003, 04:25 AM

It doesn't sound like the sony writer is at fault. Try pulling the ram and reverting to original.. if that doesn't get you more then a day of uptime then pull the sony drive and try that.. if still no work then your processor has probs.

AdvocateUK · Sep 18, 2003, 05:34 AM

current uptime after thelast reboot is 1 hour 29 minutes....no problems so far

is there any way to see what programs start at bootup and stop some?

tooki · Sep 18, 2003, 08:30 AM

What good will that do you?

Try what people said, pulling out RAM and the Sony drive (separately) to see if they're the cause.

tooki

AngryAngel · Sep 18, 2003, 08:58 AM

What are the jumpers on the Sony drive set to?

I have heard of problems when you have one on master and one on cable select, and when both are on cable select. Try a simple Master/Slave configuration, with the master on the end connector.

Probably not the cause, but worth a try.

ChrisF · Sep 18, 2003, 11:22 AM

Originally posted by AdvocateUK:
current uptime after thelast reboot is 1 hour 29 minutes....no problems so far

is there any way to see what programs start at bootup and stop some?

That won't fix your problem. Most commonly, random freezes are hardware problems in OS X. I'd suspect your aftermarket RAM- put the OEM RAM back in and see if your problem goes away.
Chris

AdvocateUK · Sep 19, 2003, 03:45 AM

Don't know how useful this is but I ran the hardware test cdrom yesterday and it passed both the short and the extended tests. The really frustrating thing about this is that after a few boots (ie once the machine has warmed up) its fine and will run all day no problems....

I can't think of ANYTHING that would do this, no component that I know of would need to warm up first....

As I said in a previous post this problem only started after I installed the dvd-writer...but common sense tells me that if there is a hardware problem with the writer then it should crash every time not just on the first few boots.

Doesn't anyone else find this a bit strange?

AdvocateUK · Sep 20, 2003, 05:58 AM

OK last night before heading for bed I pulled the Sony DVD Writer out to see if that was causing the freezes. This morning on first boot it booted into open firmware mode AAARGH!

The crashing hadn't gone away at all...

Next step was to take my Corsair mem out and put the original 256 stick back in...still no joy, random freezes in OSX

Sooooo, at the moment I have the 1gig Corsair mem and the Sony DVD Writer back in, I have had one crash with this config.

It seems to be following the usual pattern of taking longer and longer to freeze as the machine warms up, and I'm still as confused as ever.

Today I'm going to try and reset the NVRAM and see if that helps. If not then tomorrow I'm off for a format/reinstall of OSX.

*sigh* If I can't get this sorted then this machine is going back to Cancom and I may order a 1.8 G5 to replace it.

...and I thought Macs never crashed.