[DigitalEl]

I posted this in the PowerBook forum, but got no responses after more than half a day. Figured it might be more appropriate here, since it's unlikely that it's a PowerBook-specific problem.

I had a problem booting my 12" 867 MHz PowerBook G4 last week and it was temporarily solved by resetting the PMU. Now it's a few days later and... Same thing. This time, I didn't reset the PMU right away and after a few minutes, the screen went off-white and this message came up in ugly text:

Invalid memory access at %SRR0: 00014000 %SRR1: 01400000

Apple PowerBook6, 1 4.5.5f4 BootROM built on 01/14/03 at 13:44:26
Copyright 1994-2003 Apple Computer, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.

Welcome to Open Firmware, the system time and date is 17:47:39 03/31/2004

To continue booting, type "mac-boot" and press return.
To shut down, type "shut-down" and press return.

ok
0 > _

I've heard of booting into Open Firmware before, but what exactly does it mean? Does that message at the very top about an "Invalid memory access" mean I have a bad stick of RAM? I have this machine maxed out and have since getting it back in July of last year. Could memory just go bad like that? I haven't dropped, kicked or abused this machine in any way. It gets relatively little use, actually and spends most of its time on a desk.

I'm running 10.3.2 with no ShapeShifter theme or other GUImod running and nothing unusual in my Menubar. Apps running during both incidents include: Palm Desktop, Mail, Safari and Konfabulator (with just 3 widgets open) and "Red Pill" as a screen saver. I'm not sure if the screen saver was activated when she fell asleep.

One more thing. Typing "mac-boot" did boot the machine normally. I even rebooted right away and it booted normally a second time. All seems to be normal now, but why is this happening?

What now?

(BTW, I had a kernal panic on my 15" G4 iMac for only like the third time ever this morning. What are my Macs trying to tell me)?

[Millennium]

Open Firmware, first introduced to Macs with the original PCI machines, is now the very first part of the boot process, before any software is even loaded. If you were to compare it to the boot process of most Wintel machines, the closest analogy would be going into the BIOS.

I've never seen a machine boot into the OF prompt before, though, unless you actually tell it to (hold down Cmd-Opt-O-F at startup). That's a bad sign. Given your error message, it probably is bad RAM, as you suspect. If it happens again, you might try the following two commands, which together roughly equal a hardware CUDA reset (but without having to open up the machine:

Code:
set-defaults
reset-all

The machine will automatically reboot after the second command. If you actually have bad RAM then it won't solve your problems permanently, but it could buy you a little time. Remember, these commands are a last resort; they won't kill your hard drive or anything, but they can wreak havoc on certain system settings.

[Maflynn]

Originally posted by DigitalEl:
[i]Invalid memory access at %SRR0: 00014000 %SRR1: 01400000

I'dd have to concur bad memory. Any way of swapping out the memory? Otherwise it may warrent a trip to apple

[DigitalEl]

Thanks for your replies. I'll see what the frequency of these errors are. In the meantime, I may take a trip to a brick & mortar Apple Store and see what they have to say. Weekends are perfect for such ventures and besides, I have more questions for the Genius Bar folks.

It's just funny to me that it's happened out of the blue. Again, does RAM often function perfectly for nearly a year, then just flake like that?

[Maflynn]

Again, does RAM often function perfectly for nearly a year, then just flake like that? [/B]

Yeah its possible, electronic parts tend to fail early on but nothing prevents its from it failing.

Mike