[videian28]

two times now, one this morning, I woke up and went downstairs and my G5 was locked and fans were in full throttle, had to hold the power button down to get it to shut off and reboot, the other time was a few weeks ago and discovered it when I got home from work


the machine stays on 24/7 I have had it since the first ones shipped months ago, never had ANY other problems.. I kinda blew off the first hiccup as a fluke, but now the second one has struck. I run typical clean-up/optimize programs about every week or two

the machine is used for some photoshop, iMovie, iTunes, WoW, email, etc..


ideas? Should I be worried at all

[tooki]

Well, it means the OS has crashed. The way the fan control in modern Macs works is that if the fan controller doesn't receive a signal from OS X for two minutes, it automatically goes into "I think the OS has crashed and doesn't know what's going on, so I'm going to go into non-self-destruct mode". (In effect, the default fan speed is high, and the OS reduces it when it's safe to do so.) So what is happening is that for some reason, Mac OS X is crashing, so the system defaults back to full fan speed.

tooki

[UnixMac]

Originally posted by videian28:
two times now, one this morning, I woke up and went downstairs and my G5 was locked and fans were in full throttle, had to hold the power button down to get it to shut off and reboot, the other time was a few weeks ago and discovered it when I got home from work


the machine stays on 24/7 I have had it since the first ones shipped months ago, never had ANY other problems.. I kinda blew off the first hiccup as a fluke, but now the second one has struck. I run typical clean-up/optimize programs about every week or two

the machine is used for some photoshop, iMovie, iTunes, WoW, email, etc..


ideas? Should I be worried at all

Does your system go to sleep after a certain period?

OR

Are you putting it in sleep at night before you go to bed?


Cause...

When I had a USB/FireWire card plugged into a PCI slot and had certain items, like a printer, or LaCie FW Drive plugged in, and the computer went to sleep... that is EXACTLY what my G5 did... first sleep, then deep, deep, sleep where it would not respond to anything and the fans kicked in full blast, which as Tooki described occurs because OS X looses control over the hardware and the failsafe hardware mode is full bore fans to protect your CPU and other silicone inside.

Test Sleep.... set it and wait a few minutes, then disconnect USB/Firewire items and test sleep again till you isolate the item.

If it's not sleep related... there it's some other OS X issue.

[Camali]

That happened to me sometime last week. I had just installed and updated Default Folder and the system was just acting strange (St Clair Software does recommend you restart or log in/out after updating) so right before I fall asleep I decided to just shut down (this G5 also stays on 24/7) and when I woke up (7 hours later) the fans were going full speed.

But this is only like the 3rd time the G5 has done that and its just over a year old.

[videian28]

no it does not sleep, stays on 24/7

Has not done it since then, thinking of putting it to sleep at night just cause my electric bill has been nuts lately lol

[trevorM]

I put my G5 to sleep about a week ago as I do at the end of each night and came the next morning to discover the OS had crashed or hung or whatever and the fans were running at full blast literally.

I had no idea why it happened.

On a side note, those fans are incredibly loud and rather powerful at full throttle. You could cool a house with them!

[UnixMac]

Originally posted by videian28:
no it does not sleep, stays on 24/7

Has not done it since then, thinking of putting it to sleep at night just cause my electric bill has been nuts lately lol

yeah, but if it's like mine the cost between 9pm and 9am is 1/4 the cost during the day... so it's not worth it, then you also have to re-schedule your CRON scripts to keep you OS X running smoothly.

[Detrius]

Anything that crashes your Mac should be taken care of. You could have bad RAM causing the machine to crash, a bad logic board, etc... The bottom line is that your machine is crashing--especially if you can't wake it back up. Run the Apple Hardware Test and see if it says anything. If you have another clean OS that you can boot from, try that and see if it makes any difference. Of course, two crashes is not consistent enough that you can really test anything.

[videian28]

Originally posted by trevorM:
I put my G5 to sleep about a week ago as I do at the end of each night and came the next morning to discover the OS had crashed or hung or whatever and the fans were running at full blast literally.

I had no idea why it happened.

On a side note, those fans are incredibly loud and rather powerful at full throttle. You could cool a house with them!

you betcha, I thought someone was running a vacum cleaner lol

[UnixMac]

Originally posted by videian28:
you betcha, I thought someone was running a vacum cleaner lol

Lets put it like this.. you could mount wings and landing gear, and it would roll down the street and get airborne with in a few hundred feet rolling with all the air it blows out the back!

[callefoss]

if you were running Azureus bittorrent client while this happened, then this is most likely the cause of the kernel panic on a dual G5.

Just a thought...

[ThisGuy]

Originally posted by callefoss:
if you were running Azureus bittorrent client while this happened, then this is most likely the cause of the kernel panic on a dual G5.

Just a thought...

Have they corrected that yet with the new version? 2.0.2.2 or something?

[videian28]

Originally posted by callefoss:
if you were running Azureus bittorrent client while this happened, then this is most likely the cause of the kernel panic on a dual G5.

Just a thought...

heh no, those were the only 2 kernal panics I had ever actually witnessed on my G5, I promptly removed that program. Shame to, it looked pretty good

[callefoss]

Liked Azureus too. Too bad it did not work on my Dual G5. Don't know about new versions, seems it is (was) rather a bug in OS X and not the application itself. I am far from an expert on this so feel free to correct me. A third party application might crash, but if it is causing the OS to crash then there is a problem in the OS.

[videian28]

the rumor was that it was a multi processor problem, seemed to have ran fine on single processor machines

[ThisGuy]

i just remember reading somewhere that they were working on correcting the problem. i just don't know if they finally did with the latest major update.

[Leonard]

Any Norton Utilities, Norton Anti-virus, or other software installed that runs insidious background processes? I heard of one guy who seemed to be surprised that his machine kernel panic-ed while it was asleep, ammazingly it didn't do it when he uninstalled Norton. It was news to me that Norton causes problem.

[videian28]

I would not touch norton with a 10' pole

[UnixMac]

very odd think.... 6 months after getting the machine, I got my first power on KP while it was siting idle too.. same thing happened with the fans.. full blast.

Only change I made recently is going to Virex 7.5

Wonder if I should ditch it.

[power142]

Not sure if this helps, but my G5 has done this once, about a week or so after it first arrived, just sitting idle - and I've never installed virus-ridden anti-virus software on the machine. After the last firmware upgrade, it hasn't done it again, but I'm not sure they're correlated

[flyerfan182]

Yea my 2ghz G5 has the same problem! and get this i just had to send in my 21" brand new cinema display cause the USB ports quit working! I might add I bought my G5 in August of 2004. I just dont know what to do. Has anyone had any luck in getting Apple to send you a new machine?

[UnixMac]

For a Unix, OS X is not as stable as it's pears, that's for sure.

It's now windows! so I'm not going to run it down for stability, but I am a bit disappointed in the robustness of the OS compared to say Solaris.

AS for Apple, I have also been VERY disappointed with Applecare and the quality of tech support they are providing, that are only 1 notch better than Dell and Gateway IMHO, when I remember the were echelons above them just a couple of years back.

Hope Apple keeps their core customers happy and doesn't get wound up with their switcher customers and their already reduced level of expectations.

[Detrius]

Originally posted by Leonard:
Any Norton Utilities, Norton Anti-virus, or other software installed that runs insidious background processes? I heard of one guy who seemed to be surprised that his machine kernel panic-ed while it was asleep, ammazingly it didn't do it when he uninstalled Norton. It was news to me that Norton causes problem.

There is a reason it was discontinued on the Mac. Don't install it--it causes random kernel panics when you think nothing is happening.

[Superchicken]

Yah, Apple's customer service up here can be very frustrating to deal with too.