[Gamoe]

I've been experiencing a lot of frequent instability on Mac OS X since I upgraded my eMac's hard drive (from 80 GB to 160 GB) and installed Tiger (had Panther on prior). Hopefully this is not the result of some kind of accidental physical internal damage, though I think the chance of that is slim, as I was cautious and have never had problems before.

What else could this be? The system just locks up... spinning beachball of death. Sometimes it's one app or another, but regardless it starts spreading and until I have two or three apps I can't quit even with the kill -9 terminal command. If I quit the Finder, it will not relaunch. Basically, the system slowly becomes unresponsive. Could this be Tiger? I've not had this type of problem on my iBook, using Tiger, though. I have a 1Ghz. G4 eMac, using 10.4.1.

Sorry if I'm missing any info. I can't think of anythign else right now. If anything, ask and I will let you know.

[TheSpaz]

It sounds like a hard drive problem. Maybe your new drive is defective for some reason. My hard drive in my PowerBook recently started acting weird and I got the beachball cursor A LOT! It was to the point where it just sucked using my computer.... My PowerBook is a 1GHz G4 as well and it never had this problem before. I'm on my iMac G3 500MHz right now because I'm waiting for a new drive for my PowerBook and although this iMac is WAY slower than my PowerBook... Apps launch 10x faster and I don't get the spinning beachball so it's actually more tollerable to use at the moment. You should bring your hard drive back if you're having problems like that. Also, check the S.M.A.R.T. status in Disk Utility to see if the drive is having difficulties.

A few years back I bought a hard drive for my iMac and installation went perfect and it worked for about 3 days and one day I went to start up my computer and the drive would NOT spin up at all... it just stuck at the Apple screen forever... so I brought the hard drive back to the store and exchanged it and everything's been fine ever since... so you can get bad drives right out of the box...

I hope this helped... do you have a warrenty on your eMac in case the drive isn't at fault?

[Gamoe]

Originally Posted by TheSpaz

It sounds like a hard drive problem. Maybe your new drive is defective for some reason......

Thanks for your response. Sounds like your experience was very similar. I was hoping this would be the last time I had to open up my eMac. But, I guess it's that it be the drive and not the motherboard or such.

Originally Posted by TheSpaz

I hope this helped... do you have a warrenty on your eMac in case the drive isn't at fault?

Nope. Unfortunately Apple doesn't sell AppleCare for individuals here, and I think I would have voided it anyway by opening and upgrading the eMac.

We'll see. I will try for a few more days before I decide to open it up again and see.

[msuper69]

Originally Posted by Gabriel Morales

...
Nope. Unfortunately Apple doesn't sell AppleCare for individuals here, and I think I would have voided it anyway by opening and upgrading the eMac.
...

The hard drive on an eMac is a user upgradeable part and changing out the drive does not void the warranty. However, IF you had AppleCare (which in your case you can't get-I assume you're in FLA or some other exotic location), you would have to replace the drive with the original before sending the Mac back to Apple for service.

[Gamoe]

Now this...


(Click for a bigger picture)

Does anyone know if this particular error is indicative of some kind of hard drive problem?

I've very rarely ever gotten a kernel panic on my eMac. Recently I've been getting all sorts of errors. I thought the system was running pretty smoothly after upgrading to 10.4.2, but now I get this. I upgraded the eMac's hard drive so I could finally settle down all my data in one place (with backups, of course!) and run more efficiently, rather than jump around different hard drives. Now it seems I may have to go through more trouble. I think this is the last all-in-one Mac I am getting as a main machine....

[Gamoe]

And yet more goodness.... :-/


(Click for a bigger picture)

Seems to be the same error, too. This one occurred at startup, after I was forced to restart due to some more "instability".

[dopik]

I have some instability since I installed a 1Go of RAM in my PowerBook as well. I run twice the Apple Hardware Test and both time, it was OK.

Now, I am wondering whether it would not be better for me to make a brand new installation of Tiger...

dopik

[tomocoo]

I also just added a stick of 1gb to my new Powerbook 12" and now applications, notably iTunes and sometimes Safari crash all the time. OS X is stable. How do I run a ram test and what other measures could I take to fix the problem?

Thanks