[rhogue islander]

Hey all,

I have a dual G5 2.0 ghz w/ Ati Radeon 9800 Pro and 1.5gb's of ram. I've had this machine since early October. OS is 10.3.2. When I first got the machine I did an upgrade install on my drive from my G4 Quicksilver to 10.2.8 and subsequently upgraded that to Panther when it became available (it is residing the G5's 160mb SATA drive).

It's been rock steady since I bought it, but in the past two weeks I've been getting some 'unexpected quits'. First with Mozilla (which sometimes happens anayway), then several times with Mail, then a few times with ACDSee and most recently in Quake3 I had a freeze just when a new map was about to be loaded.

This IS unusual behavior and I think it might be coinciding with hard disk activity. When I had the Q3 lockup, I was still able to enter sleep mode and recover from it. Does this mean that the OS and general hardware were still functioning normally? I did not know how to force quit with a keyboard shortcut so I ended up doing a hard power down and restart, after which I was able to engage in more Q3 multiplayer without incident.

I've run the hardware test (no problems) and used Cocktail to run all maintenance tasks. Persmissions are OK.

Anyway these 'quits' seem to be slowly becoming more frequent. In the previous 5 months they were virtually nonexistent.

[Detrius]

If the problem were hardware related, you should be getting either KPs or hard freezes (mouse doesn't move). Otherwise, it's probably software related.

note: command-option-escape is force quit. In a full screen opengl app, it should kill the app immediately without a popup window.

[rhogue islander]

Thank you for your reply.

I came home this afternoon and woke my G5 from sleep. The mouse light came on, but the displays did not activate.

Next the fans slowly started to ramp up, getting louder and louder until I performed a hard reset, after which the machine booted normally. This has never happened before.

If I reset the cuda switch, is an OS reinstall necessary or can I just go about business as usual after I've done it?

[drohde]

OS reinstall is not necessary after resetting the PMU chip. Be sure to only press the PMU ONCE!

[Dyeus]

What happends if you press it twice? (just curious)

[MacSI]

I have experienced the similar problem. In my machine (G5 1.8 SP, OS 10.3.2), the "unexpected quit" is always preceded with a brief (about 5-10 seconds) of heavy hard drive access. The problem has hit every application I am using (MS Word, Safari, Photoshop, Illustrator, and etc.). It does happen often but it is annoying.

[rhogue islander]

Well since I reset the PMU and installed the 10.3.3 update, everything seems to be fine. Might be too early to be sure though.

I wonder if the higher fan speed in the drive bay has anything to do with it.