The continuing (mis)adventures of a guy and his MDD...
- From: Don Bruder <dakidd@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 04 May 2012 01:40:09 -0700
Remember the other day when I said I wanted to do something unorthodox?
Well, I guess I got my wish...
Part of what led up to my deciding to do a re-install of Tiger was the
fact that I recently started getting panics at an unusual rate, and for
no reasons that were at all apparent.
Monday morning, I left the rig, as usual, running a chunk of code I've
written, and which, until now, anyway, has been behaving perfectly - No
reason to suspect any misbehavior from it aside from one small leak that
I just can't pin down - Instead of leaving it run 24/7, I need to quit
and restart it about every third day to clean up the leakage. Aside from
that, no particular problems, nothing fancy being done, or anything like
that.
Monday afternoon when I got back from work, I walked in to find it
sitting at the "You need to restart your computer" panic screen. Mash
and hold the button. Bonggggggggg. Long delay - At least 3 times usual.
Grey screen with darker grey apple logo. Spinning thing below it appears
and spins for a while. Dark blue screen and <clickety-click> noises as
monitor switches resolutions (normal for this monitor) to show the usual
pale blue screen. Then pale blue screen turns into the panic screen.
Aw, crap...
Do the restart cycle again. Identical results. Repeat x3, maybe x4,
can't remember for sure. Recall the old line about doing the same thing
over and over while expecting a different result being a sign of mental
illness and stop. Pull out Install DVD (A Retail Tiger that installs
10.4.6) and boot from there. Boots up fine. Drops me into the installer
as expected. Use the utilities menu to swap startup drives to the second
internal drive in the system (Which had a "mirror copy" of the 10.4.11
installation that the primary drive has been running for at least 2
years now.) and restart.
Machine boots up. Drop to terminal and clone the primary drive to a
folder on the half-terabyte external drive using
sudo cp -Rv /Volumes/Primary/ /Volumes/External/OldPrimary/
Go to the kitchen and make/eat supper.
Come back after eating to find that the copy has finished.
Click on the desktop to get out of the terminal window, and <SPLAT>
There's the panic screen again. OK, now I'm getting worried...
Restart. All looks good until just after the desktop appears, but before
all the various "things I leave sitting on the desktop" icons have
finihed showing up - I'd guesstimate that half of them appeared before
<SPLAT> There's that lovely panic screen again...
Long story shorter...
Now it's three days later, Both of the internal drives have been cloned
to the external, both have been zeroed out and repartitioned via Disk
Utilities from the install DVD, installer has been run more times than I
can remember accurately, aimed at both of the internal drives,
everything other than "absolute bare bones" has been pulled off the
machine - I've pulled the "plain white box" USB 2 card, the "Sonnet"
pseudo-airport card, and I've even tried going back to the original
512Megs of RAM that came with the machine (in the form of two 256 meg
sticks - Down from the 4x512MB sticks that have been running in it just
fine for about 2 years now. All in vain... I still have no live MDD - I
get one of two results when I try to restart: Either it panics before
the desktop appears, or it gets to the point where I'd expect the
desktop to appear, and then the monitor goes into "I'm getting no signal
- no point in my staying awake" shutdown mode, and nothing I can do will
"wake it up".
Going for a "safe boot" from either of the internal drives works fine -
Except that in that mode, I can't accomplish anything useful.
I've zapped the PRAM, and dropped into open-firmware to reset the NVRAM
(both done multiple times) as suggested by various sources (including
Apple). No change. Hit the PMU reset button inside. No change. Pulled
one drive, then the other. No change.
Putting the drives in the Sawtooth works fine - Both of them boot it
without a hitch, so clearly, it's not "their fault". This message is
coming at you through the ersatz Airport card, also plugged into the
sawtooth, so I'd say that it isn't the trouble. Likewise, the USB2 card
and the external drive that hangs off it are also now plugged into the
Sawtooth and working fine, so I'd say a problem there is eliminated.
At this point, I'm at wit's end - As one might imagine, going from a
dual 867MHz system to a single 400MHz CPU is quite the performance
hit... But for the moment, at least, it's what I'm stuck with.
Anybody got any suggestions for me to try? I'm ready to attempt just
about anything that doesn't involve money-that's-not-in-the-budget to
get this rig back up and running.
(Took a quick glance around the web and decided that replacing the MB is
going to be a no-go... Of the three places I looked, the cheapest was
well over $500 - $595.95, to be exact! Since I only gave $125 for the
machine in the first place, and a brand new Mini only costs...)
--
Don Bruder - dakidd@xxxxxxxxx - If your "From:" address isn't on my whitelist,
or the subject of the message doesn't contain the exact text "PopperAndShadow"
somewhere, any message sent to this address will go in the garbage without my
ever knowing it arrived. Sorry... <http://www.sonic.net/~dakidd> for more info
.
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