[hickey]

Ok so I think im in a pretty crappy spot right now with my pbook. It all started when I was trying to add a bunch of new music to my itunes library, I was taking it off my external hard drive and dragging it into my library. It seemed like none of the 4 gigs of stuff that I added actually made its way into my library, so I tried doing it a few more times. Sometimes I would find some of it, and other times I wouldnt. I also noticed that my HD space would continue to diminish after I re-imported some of the same files more than once, even though I didnt find them half of the time.

Then I tried to run Adium and Camino while (trying) to add my new music. Camino always hung up and gave the spinnning beach ball all the time, the menu would open up for it in the tool bar but no windows would open. Adium would just try and sign on forever, it had the little symbol of a spinning box on top of its icon on the dock. So I had to force quit both apps several times before I finally gave up on both. So Im using Safari now.

Then I tried to download all the software updates, 10.4.6, pro app support, itunes updater, everything that was available to install. The ipod updater was the only thing out of all 8 or 9 that didnt install. Then upon restart, it was stuck on the gray box where it usually says "starting mac osx" but it didnt say anything or have a blue progress bar. So after I forced a restart by holding the power button and it successully starting, I find a file called mach_kernel. After It took almost a whole minute to open, it says this "Last login: Mon Apr 3 17:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
Macintosh:~ erichickey$ " And the title of the window says Terminal-bash-80x24.

Hopefully somone here can help me out, I really just want my comp to back to the way it was working before, correctly. BTW, its a 15" pbook, 1.25GHz, 1gig RAM.

Sorry if the post is to long.

[hookem2oo7]

that is definitely not a kernel panic. those symptoms sound like a disk problem/failure to me

[draggerman11]

I can't help you, but how long did it "hang" on the gray screen? Because after installing the 10.4.6 update, it restarts twice, and when I installed it, it waited at that screen for a while and then restarted the second time, and then loaded fine.

[ibookuser2]

No, that's not a kernel panic. A kernel panic is when the core system gets itself to the point where it literally doesn't know how to handle what's going on, and the system halts. OS X's kernel usually displays a message in four languages telling you that you need to restart the computer, but sometimes it can't even do that and dumps a bunch of diagnostic text over the screen, or hangs with no other indication.

It sounds like you're having disk/filesystem problems. Losing track of files, poor virtual memory performance, and hidden files suddenly appearing (the mach_kernel file *is* the kernel–it is very important and is supposed to be there, but it's normally a hidden file) are all indications of a corrupted filesystem.

Basically, your hard drive has special files on it that keep track of where files are physically located on the disk, and where one stops and the next one starts. If these files get corrupted, then your drive no longer knows where things are or that they exist at all.

First, back up your important files.

I'd suggest running Disk Utility, first performing a "Repair Disk" operation. Run that until it doesn't produce errors anymore. If there are errors that it cannot fix, then it's time to reformat your hard drive, re-install Tiger, and restore your files from the backups you made. If, however, it's able to fix everything, you may be okay. I'd follow that up with a "Repair Permissions" operation.

[hickey]

Originally Posted by ibookuser2

No, that's not a kernel panic. A kernel panic is when the core system gets itself to the point where it literally doesn't know how to handle what's going on, and the system halts. OS X's kernel usually displays a message in four languages telling you that you need to restart the computer, but sometimes it can't even do that and dumps a bunch of diagnostic text over the screen, or hangs with no other indication.

It sounds like you're having disk/filesystem problems. Losing track of files, poor virtual memory performance, and hidden files suddenly appearing (the mach_kernel file *is* the kernel–it is very important and is supposed to be there, but it's normally a hidden file) are all indications of a corrupted filesystem.

Basically, your hard drive has special files on it that keep track of where files are physically located on the disk, and where one stops and the next one starts. If these files get corrupted, then your drive no longer knows where things are or that they exist at all.

First, back up your important files.

I'd suggest running Disk Utility, first performing a "Repair Disk" operation. Run that until it doesn't produce errors anymore. If there are errors that it cannot fix, then it's time to reformat your hard drive, re-install Tiger, and restore your files from the backups you made. If, however, it's able to fix everything, you may be okay. I'd follow that up with a "Repair Permissions" operation.

thats what I thought, but since I found the mach_kernel file I didnt know what was what.

Anyway, after repairing the disk, which said the disk was fine, and repairng the permissions, which turned out ok, my pbook is doing a little bit better. I still have some un-found music files that Im searching for, but all my apps open like they should. So it looks like Im on the road to recovery.

Thanks all.

[tooki]

This is a Mac OS X topic, not a PowerBook topic.

tooki