[lowend]

It's kind of odd, but I have found one reliable way to crash X, in both 10.2 and 10.3. Put in some sort of DVD that's scratched or has a problem, and OSX - it's happend both on my 17 inch iMac and Pismo Powerbook - gives me the beach ball when it reaches the offending spot, and that's where it stays. Force quit won't work, and only a hard reset will get me out. Otherwise, I have nearly perfect stability. Anybody else seen this sort of behavior?

[dbergstrom]

I would guess that you have crashed the DVD player and since you are in full screen mode you are having trouble accessing Terminal.app to kill DVD Player with extreme prejudice (kill -9).

Next time it happens, try connecting into the frozen computer from your other computer via ssh. Then do a top, get the PID for DVD Player, and try to kill the process. I bet the DVD player will quit and the crashed machine will resume what it was doing.

[MartiNZ]

I haven't seen it but have heard about it, in fact I was rung about it - and I suggested a hard reset, as you say, which did the trick. A bummer that it doesn't just come up with a dialog saying "There is a problem with this disc!" with options Retry and Eject, or something. Or even just eject it and then complain. After all it seems to have no trouble just ejecting some copy controlled CDs, so it should just have the same behaviour when it can't understand information on the disc.

In fact, my first suggestion would be rather reminiscent of the Amstrad CPC way, whereby it said Drive A: Read Fail, Retry, Ignore or Cancel. So obviously it can be done as that was a long time ago! Sort of like Office 2004 is going to have page layout view when Claris Works had it ... almost as long ago!

[Powaqqatsi]

Oh I have a DIvX that hard locks my machine even when the terminal is active and ready with the kill command. When the movie comes to a certain point eveything locks up I cant kill or do anything.

[lowend]

Should it happen again I'll try that terminal thingie. I've never done much with terminal, but I suppose it's always time to learn. It's not like this happens very much, but you know, you rent from netflix, and sometimes those discs are bunged up.

Last night's freeze seized everything up - dock, menus, all of it. It was as if the computer was fully focused on trying to read the DVD, but was at the same time completely locked up. Bummer.

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally posted by MartiNZ:
I haven't seen it but have heard about it, in fact I was rung about it - and I suggested a hard reset, as you say, which did the trick. A bummer that it doesn't just come up with a dialog saying "There is a problem with this disc!" with options Retry and Eject, or something.

actually, I've had a scratched DVD in my friend's G4 iMac, and it did EXACTLY that.

It hung, and after a *long* time (several minutes), it threw up a dialog telling me that the disk was probably dirty or damaged, and that I should clean it and try again or something.

If DVD Player hangs, shouldn't Expos� still work, though, to switch applications?

-s*

[Ratm]

Command-Option-Shift-Esc: force quits the frontmost application without asking or showing a dialog. OSX Hints

[Moonray]

And you have not crashed OS X at all.

-

[stew]

Originally posted by Powaqqatsi:
Oh I have a DIvX that hard locks my machine even when the terminal is active and ready with the kill command. When the movie comes to a certain point eveything locks up I cant kill or do anything.

I have a similar DivX. Playing it in VLC is a reliable way of locking up any OS X computer (I tried several) so that nothing would respond any more (including command-option-eesc).

[ryju]

This will sometimes happen for me watching any movie full screen, if QTPlayer happens to get the beachball it's hard to get out of fullscreen to even kill the damn thing. Stupid 8mb video..

[holygoat]

I've had VLC lock up completely before... handily, hammering the Eject button on my iBook seemed to generate enough interrupts that I could get Terminal open and kill it. Intriguing.

[gorickey]

Originally posted by Spheric Harlot:
If DVD Player hangs, shouldn't Expos� still work, though, to switch applications?

I would think so, probably just depends on how hard the "lock" is...

[wadesworld]

If the application has already captured the display, Expose will not work.

Wade

[lenox]

Unless, of course, it's a crappily-ported game that never actually captures the screen, like Halo.