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You are here: MacNN Forums > Software - Troubleshooting and Discussion > macOS > OS 9 like crash in OS X - how often do you see that?

OS 9 like crash in OS X - how often do you see that?
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badidea
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Jan 6, 2005, 12:16 PM
 
Just wondering how normal this still is since OS X should either kernel panic or not crash at all...

Now what is an "OS 9 like crash" you might ask?
Well, that's a crash where everything freezes (including the mouse pointer) - just like in the old days. It happened to me last night. First I thought the battery of my wireless mouse would be empty but after replacing it, I still couldn't do anything anymore. Keyboard was dead, too!
I have seen this maybe 1-2 times per year since OS 10.0 - did it ever happen to you?
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Dog Like Nature
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Jan 6, 2005, 12:23 PM
 
This was almost certainly not an entire system lockup -- merely the UI.
If you have ssh enabled, you can usually log in from a remote system and clean it up.

While this isn't the sort of thing a novice would want to do (assuming they had the extra hardware lying around), it can be useful to salvage work that wasn't saved when the UI froze.
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cpac
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Jan 6, 2005, 12:24 PM
 
Originally posted by badidea:
Just wondering how normal this still is since OS X should either kernel panic or not crash at all...

Now what is an "OS 9 like crash" you might ask?
Well, that's a crash where everything freezes (including the mouse pointer) - just like in the old days. It happened to me last night. First I thought the battery of my wireless mouse would be empty but after replacing it, I still couldn't do anything anymore. Keyboard was dead, too!
I have seen this maybe 1-2 times per year since OS 10.0 - did it ever happen to you?
sure it's happened to me - but usually when I have a memory leaking beta application running somewhere (and so it's not *really* frozen, it's just the the GUI is so damn slow that it would take days to quit things - if you could log in remotely you could probably kill the offending process and get thigns back to normal) - but yes, it's happened to me.
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Millennium
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Jan 6, 2005, 12:28 PM
 
Logging in remotely is all well and good, if you have a second machine from which you can log in and you had the foresight to enable remote login before the lockup occurred. Most users, however, can't do that.

Personally, I prefer the approach of introducing a "magic key-combo" similar to Cmd-Opt-Esc, which would force-quit the GUI and let the user log back in. Ambrosia did something like this a while back with their freeware EscapePod, but I haven't used it in a while; does it still work with Panther?
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badidea  (op)
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Jan 6, 2005, 12:36 PM
 
Originally posted by Dog Like Nature:
This was almost certainly not an entire system lockup -- merely the UI.
If you have ssh enabled, you can usually log in from a remote system and clean it up.
Oh right, that was probably it! That's what I also had today at work on my HP Unix workstation and at work I usually go to the next workstation, do a rlogin and kill the problematic stuff! At home I don't have a second computer...
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Macola
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Jan 6, 2005, 01:48 PM
 
Had this happen recently when SimCity 4 froze up. I had to reset my Mac. That's about the only app that does it, though.
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Dog Like Nature
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Jan 6, 2005, 03:07 PM
 
Yes, a key combination to kill WindowServer would do the trick, and this would also kill any children. Of course, if the foreground app disconnects from it's parent (what us UNIX folks call a fork/exec/exit) then killing WindowServer won't affect it.
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Chuckit
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Jan 6, 2005, 06:50 PM
 
Originally posted by Dog Like Nature:
Yes, a key combination to kill WindowServer would do the trick, and this would also kill any children.
escapepod

Originally posted by Dog Like Nature:
Of course, if the foreground app disconnects from it's parent (what us UNIX folks call a fork/exec/exit) then killing WindowServer won't affect it.
I didn't think it was possible to fork a GUI app like that, because a GUI app needs to be given a connection to the WindowServer on launch. (Not that I've tried; I just assumed so based on the WindowServer's pickiness.)
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TheTraveller
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Jan 6, 2005, 08:16 PM
 
This has happened to me once or twice since 10.0, but not in quite some time. I did have that problem that many folks have had, "Mouse moves but nothing else" (there's like a 14 page thread about that on these forums) - but I haven't had that in six months, either. One or two KP's in the last six months, that's about it. Pretty darn reliable, and so so sooooo much better than Pre-OSX days.
     
Doc Juansinn
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Jan 7, 2005, 01:45 AM
 
Yup, it's happened to me too. Never happened in X until about three months ago. I hope it is something about my hardware and/or software that is causing it. I'd rather not think that the Mac OS is regressing back to the old OS 7.5.3 days. Ahh, a clean install every two months!
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moonmonkey
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Jan 7, 2005, 01:52 AM
 
Originally posted by Macola:
Had this happen recently when SimCity 4 froze up. I had to reset my Mac. That's about the only app that does it, though.
I have it with a few 3D games, it can usualy be traced to a I/O issue.

Putting the CD on a disk image usauly fixes it.
     
badidea  (op)
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Jan 7, 2005, 05:05 AM
 
Originally posted by Chuckit:
escapepod
Next time it happens, I hope this app will help!
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mAxximo
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Jan 7, 2005, 11:50 AM
 
It's been happening to me once every few weeks with this Dual G5. When it's not the total lockups it's the applications unexpectedly quitting or �not responding�. At least when OS 9 crashed (and it crashed A LOT less than this garbage) it did it only after leaving blood, sweat and tears on the pitch. OS X breaks at the drop of a hat, crashing at times while I'm just watching the screen doing nothing.

I know, it might be my system, RAM, blah, blah.
     
cpac
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Jan 7, 2005, 01:15 PM
 
Originally posted by mAxximo:
When it's not the total lockups it's the applications unexpectedly quitting or �not responding�.
That's got nothing to do with the system, and everything to do with those apps.

And crashes in OS 9 took the whole machine with them - its *MUCH* better now when a single app crashing just means you have to relaunch that app rather than rebooting the whole machine and losing whatever work you'd done in other applications...

(ps - if you are experiencing crashes more frequently than in os 9 then something about your system is seriously fubarred - but then, it seems you know this, and don't seem to care or want to fix it...)
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Chuckit
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Jan 7, 2005, 01:44 PM
 
Originally posted by mAxximo:
It's been happening to me once every few weeks with this Dual G5. When it's not the total lockups it's the applications unexpectedly quitting or �not responding�. At least when OS 9 crashed (and it crashed A LOT less than this garbage) it did it only after leaving blood, sweat and tears on the pitch. OS X breaks at the drop of a hat, crashing at times while I'm just watching the screen doing nothing.
Yes, it's much worse now that OS X allows apps to simply hang and be relaunched instead of politely crashing the computer, possibly corrupting the file system and forcing you to reboot.
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Macola
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Jan 7, 2005, 10:55 PM
 
Originally posted by moonmonkey:
I have it with a few 3D games, it can usualy be traced to a I/O issue.

Putting the CD on a disk image usauly fixes it.
Unfortunately, that was the first thing I did and it didn't help. Of course, SC4 is such a crappy port that nothing surprises me...
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wadesworld
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Jan 8, 2005, 05:39 PM
 
It's been happening to me once every few weeks with this Dual G5. When it's not the total lockups it's the applications unexpectedly quitting or �not responding�. At least when OS 9 crashed (and it crashed A LOT less than this garbage) it did it only after leaving blood, sweat and tears on the pitch. OS X breaks at the drop of a hat, crashing at times while I'm just watching the screen doing nothing.

I know, it might be my system, RAM, blah, blah.
Dude, get off your high horse and stop acting like it can't be anything wrong with your system.

It IS your system, your hardware or the application. There are a *ton* of people on here who have gone years without anything but the occassional rare application crash.

If yours is doing it once every two weeks, then something IS wrong and it's not because OS X is "crap."

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Superchicken
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Jan 9, 2005, 05:15 AM
 
Last time this happened it was followed by the click of death with my HD.
     
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Jan 9, 2005, 02:15 PM
 
Originally posted by mAxximo:
It's been happening to me once every few weeks with this Dual G5. When it's not the total lockups it's the applications unexpectedly quitting or �not responding�. At least when OS 9 crashed (and it crashed A LOT less than this garbage) it did it only after leaving blood, sweat and tears on the pitch. OS X breaks at the drop of a hat, crashing at times while I'm just watching the screen doing nothing.

I know, it might be my system, RAM, blah, blah.
Bad/marginal RAM can do this. Corrupted system software can do it as well. It *IS* something odd with your machine.

Personally, this has never happened to me on 5 different Macs I've had since OS X was released.
     
Ilja
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Jan 9, 2005, 06:05 PM
 
Originally posted by Superchicken:
Last time this happened it was followed by the click of death with my HD.
Same here...
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lookmark
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Jan 9, 2005, 06:31 PM
 
I haven't seen an OS 9-style system "freeze", or kernel panic, since the early days of the OS (10.1.x).

OTOH, I do find system slowdowns frustrating. OS X just eats up RAM, and when it doesn't have enough things get weird and very sluggish (still).
     
   
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