Jump to content

Leopard crashes non-stop. Troubleshooting ideas?

ZosoM3

By ZosoM3,
in OSx86 10.5 (Leopard)

 Share
81 posts in this topic

Recommended Posts

ZosoM3
ZosoM3
Posted
Posted

On my system, I did a dual boot install with Kalyway Leopard. I have a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L, Q6600, 4GB RAM. I started with a fresh XP install on my first SATA drive. I then put in a second SATA drive, and popped in my Kalyway DVD.

 

I did an MBR install with the Vanilla kernel. All went smoothly and after installation, I went back into Windows and set up the dual boot with the chain0 method.

 

All worked well and I installed patches to get my sound and enet working.

 

I started customizing Leopard and installing programs... it worked great - nice and fast.

 

 

Now a few days later, I'm having crashing problems. They seem to happen when the disk is very active.... like when spotlight is running. The computer just freezes and tells me to hold down the power button to restart the computer.

 

I tried putting up console to look for errors but it doesn't report anything - just freezes.

 

I thought maybe the program that I installed that lets me read and write to my NTFS Windows drives was the problem so I uninstalled that but it didn't fix the crashing.

 

I then disabled spotlight in terminal for the Leopard drive and unmounted the NTFS drives.

 

Still crashes with nothing in console.

 

 

Ideas?

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Apple Sauce
Apple Sauce
Posted
Posted

I can only offer empathy ... I have the exact same problem.

 

A few notes on differences in my system to help elliminate the source of the problem:

* I have the DS3R (but still P35)

* My second drive is an IDE drive

* I did not use chain 0 ... I select which drive to boot through BIOS.

* Second drive is FAT not NTFS

* Installation is GPT not MBR (EFI v8 + brazilmac running vanilla kernel)

 

Same symptoms. Generally running great. Heavy disk activity results randomly in gray screen of death.

 

I've also stopped spotlight from indexing my second drive ... no help yet

Link to comment
Share on other sites
ZosoM3
ZosoM3
Posted
  • Author
Posted

I can tell you that I've disabled all the CPU flair (Speedstep, etc) in the BIOS. No difference.

 

This stinks because Leopard runs great when I'm just surfing the web. It works great when I do a benchmark (including disc test)... but not it even crashes when I leave a screensaver running (with system sleep and HD sleep disabled).

 

If I can't figure this out, I may have to go back to using XP as my main OS because at least that was stable. I'll post here if I figure anything out.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
wigworm
wigworm
Posted
Posted

I have the same board P35-DS3L and it runs very stable. I'm using iATKOS and efi emu. I had it freeze up a couple of times for no known reason but that's it so far.

 

Another thing though, I can never soft shut down or reboot. I had to hard reboot (press reset button). When I do soft shut down, everything seems to stop, the screen shuts down but somehow the harddrive seems to be still running. Weird...

Link to comment
Share on other sites
ZosoM3
ZosoM3
Posted
  • Author
Posted

I tried iATKOS before Kalyway and had the same shutdown problem as you described.Overall I found the Kalyway install to go easier and more queston free.

I can only offer empathy ... I have the exact same problem. A few notes on differences in my system to help elliminate the source of the problem:* I have the DS3R (but still P35)* My second drive is an IDE drive* I did not use chain 0 ... I select which drive to boot through BIOS.* Second drive is FAT not NTFS* Installation is GPT not MBR (EFI v8 + brazilmac running vanilla kernel)Same symptoms. Generally running great. Heavy disk activity results randomly in gray screen of death.I've also stopped spotlight from indexing my second drive ... no help yet

 

Curious to see if we have any programs in common that could be the culprit.

 

I've installed on my system:

iLife 08

Adium

Firefox

Parallels (still trying to get that to work)

Peerguardian

Paragon NTFS for Mac

No-IP client

enabled web server

 

When I disable spotlight and enable it, it does give me this one error in console while cataloging my drive:

12/30/07 2:21:53 PM com.apple.quicklook[163] invalid #-escape sequence.

12/30/07 2:21:53 PM com.apple.quicklook[163] encountered unexpected object type: 7.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
ZosoM3
ZosoM3
Posted
  • Author
Posted

more:

 

 

I put it together that the crashing started when I copied over my 77GB iPhoto library from an external USB.

 

 

After uninstalling a bunch of applications without fixing the crashing problem, I deleted the 77GB iPhoto library from my main drive.

 

I then stopped, cleared, and restarted Spotlight (this before could cause me a crash 100% of the time). It ran without fail.

 

I'm currently copying the library back over to test again... but I wonder if there is some issue with large iPhoto libraries.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
LeonDEpro
LeonDEpro
Posted
Posted

same thing happens to me, more frequently when I'm running vmware fusion 1.1 with 2GB ram allocated to my virtual XP.

 

I suspected that it might be caused by the cracked kernel which might have prob when we're using 4GB RAM, but I didn't have the time to prove it. Someone told me to remove 1GB of ram or try to turn off sdram remapping in BIOS. Wonder if anyone here ever tried this method.

 

Is this prob only occuring to those who got 4GB of RAM installed?

 

p.s I'm running Kalyway 10.5.1. It runs great, yet this tiny tinny prob reaaaaaly stinks.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Trance2007
Trance2007
Posted
Posted

Hey All,

 

I had installed IATKOS and it is running smooth / fine instead of Restart-Shut Down-Sleep(Bermuda Triangle!) commands. When I start application called Azureus to dl some torrents, I got that "gray screen of death" Hold power button to restart bla bla thing after 30 - 45 min running time of the app Azureus. Any advices for get rid of it?

 

Thx,

 

Trance2007

Link to comment
Share on other sites
thirtysomething
thirtysomething
Posted
Posted

UPDATE: I'm happy to report that iDVD no longer crashes after I took out one of the 2GB RAM sticks. It's too bad that potential 64-bit apps won't have 4GB to work with. So much hardware with nothing to run it!

Here is the original post about the problem:

-----------------------------------------------------------

 

My iATKOS Leopard 10.5.1 crashes when I run iDVD and it gets to the stage where it starts to put audio and video together. Same grey screen of death every time at the same spot (no matter what iDVD template used, etc). There's nothing in the console to indicate a crash.

 

Here's my hardware and installation configuration:

 

Gigabyte P35-DS3L

Intel Core2Quad Q6600 running at stock speed

ATI X1950XT

4GB RAM (2 sticks)

System on 80GB IDE hard drive

There is a connected SATA hard drive (NTFS)

 

iATKOS installation settings:

 

No EFI

Patched (not Vanilla) Kernel

No SpeedStep (tried with and without SpeedStep -- same crashing)

ATI X1950XT kext

AppleSMBios kext

 

To get sound working, I used AppleHDAPatcher 1.20 and an alc888.txt codec dump. Stereo works perfectly, haven't tested multi-channel or digital out.

 

Software Installed:

 

iLife08

Hamachi (though not running)

 

 

---

 

The system seems stable so far for browsing the internet, etc. I have not used my iLife very extensively. My Mac Mini can run iDVD fine, but not this Hackintosh. It would be nice if the Console reported the crash but I don't see anything there.

 

I'll try removing one stick (2GB) of RAM and report the results.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
ZosoM3
ZosoM3
Posted
  • Author
Posted

Thanks, I'll try taking out a few RAM sticks to bring me back to 2GB.

 

I avoided my iPhoto crashing problem by telling Spotlight to not scan my iPhoto library. Unfortunately I found another way to make the system crash a few days later. It happens while importing music from an NTFS drive to the iTunes library which is on another PATA NTFS drive. (I'm using Paragon to read and write

 

At first I tried slowing my CPU back down from 3.33GHz to 3.0GHz. This helped some at first (or so I thought) but wasn't a total fix. It would crash after importing a few albums. I then formated the PATA NTFS drive as HFS+ and bam - I imported with no problems.

 

The reason the drive was originally NTFS was that I don't trust FAT32 and I wanted both Windows and Leopard to be able to access the drive. I'd love to migrate most of my every day use to the Mac, but I need to be able to trust it.

 

Perhaps the issue is with the JMicron IDE/SATA controller drivers?

 

 

I was also able to get Leopard to crash while decrypting a DVD movie. I plan to try to reproduce that tonight now that the PATA drive is formatted in HFS+. I'll also try removing the other NTFS drive in the system and removing those two RAM sticks.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
LeonDEpro
LeonDEpro
Posted
Posted

looks like taking out a ram stick does help. I removed one of my four 1GB DDR2 800 sticks and ran Leopard with 3GB of ram, it did not crash in the last consecutive 48 hours.

 

Too bad the cracked Leopard cant stay stable with 4GB of RAM. Maybe a real Mac won't have this prob, will it?

 

My spec:

Core 2 Duo E4400 @ 2GHz -running w/ patched vanilla kernel, no speedstep (crashed no matter with or without speedstep)

4x1GB DDR2 800 RAM -removed one of them and no crash ever happened again

ATI 1950GT 256MB

Seagate 320GB + Seagate 80GB SATA HDDs

Mobo with Intel 965 chipset & ICH8 - with onboard JMicron IDE/SATA controller for connecting my IDE DVD burner

Kalyway 10.5.1 Leopard + Vista Ultimate SP1 (former on 80GB HDD and latter on 320GB), dual boot with EaseBCD

Link to comment
Share on other sites
ZosoM3
ZosoM3
Posted
  • Author
Posted

THAT WORKED!

 

I followed LeonDEpro's advice and took one of my RAM sticks and tried ripping a DVD on MacTheRipper (which will cause a crash). It didn't crash! I also tried running Spotlight on my Leopard drive with huge iPhoto library. This usually also results in a crash. No crash!

 

I, too, am disappointed that I can't use all 4GB of my RAM. I paid a good $35 or so for that second pair of DDR 800 1GB sticks!

 

The question is - what does the PC do with only 3 sticks? Does it run all three in single channel or 1 pair in dual channel with 1 in single channel? If all in single channel, it 2GB in dual channel better?

 

Thanks for solving this problem. Hopefully I won't be able to find anything else that causes the Mac to crash!

Link to comment
Share on other sites
wigworm
wigworm
Posted
Posted
THAT WORKED!

 

I followed LeonDEpro's advice and took one of my RAM sticks and tried ripping a DVD on MacTheRipper (which will cause a crash). It didn't crash! I also tried running Spotlight on my Leopard drive with huge iPhoto library. This usually also results in a crash. No crash!

 

I, too, am disappointed that I can't use all 4GB of my RAM. I paid a good $35 or so for that second pair of DDR 800 1GB sticks!

 

The question is - what does the PC do with only 3 sticks? Does it run all three in single channel or 1 pair in dual channel with 1 in single channel? If all in single channel, it 2GB in dual channel better?

 

Thanks for solving this problem. Hopefully I won't be able to find anything else that causes the Mac to crash!

 

Yuck, you now have 3 1GB running in single channel. You may as well ditch the single and run 2 GB in dual channel.

 

Weird that 4 GB cause such problem...

Link to comment
Share on other sites
LeonDEpro
LeonDEpro
Posted
Posted

Congrats, ZosoM3, and wigworm, I'm glad to report that it looks like my 3 sticks of 1GB RAM DO run in dual channel mode, as I can tell from my mobo BIOS detection screen as well as in CPU-Z.

 

Perhaps it's just "displayed" as dual channel mode, but I found nothing different in actual Windows & Leopard operation. The only regret is that, just like ZosoM3, one of my 1GB DDR800 stick has to stay out of my sight so that it won't remind me of my $35 goner...

 

Anyway, Vista 32bit cannot fully utilize the 4GB RAM, and Leopard runs perfectly smooth. It's worth that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
thirtysomething
thirtysomething
Posted
Posted

UPDATE: My iATKOS Leopard 10.5.1 runs stable with 4GB RAM in Single-Channel mode.

 

Single-channel mode is not noticeably slower than dual-channel. I saw some benchmarks somewhere.

 

Here's what I did:

 

I first made sure that the system was stable with 1 stick of 2GB, then tried putting back the other 2GB stick in the next slot -- thereby NOT triggering dual-channel mode on my motherboard (Gigabyte P35-DS3L). The system has run stable even after overclocking my Core2Quad to 3GHz and rendering a 10-minute HD home video (1080p) in iMovie 08, and after creating a DVD in iDVD.

 

I don't know for how long it will be stable, but it no longer crashes when rendering in iDVD 08. I'm not an expert, but I'm taking a guess that 4GB in dual-channel mode was the cause of the iDVD-triggered grey-screen-of-death. As an experiment, I will put my system back into dual-channel mode and see if it crashes. Keeping my fingers crossed and will report any new developments.

Here's the system and setup (I have re-configured and re-installed my system since my last post).

 

Gigabyte P35-DS3L

Intel Core2Quad Q6600 running at 333 FSB (3.0 GHz)

ATI X1950XT

4GB RAM (2 sticks in SINGLE-CHANNEL mode)

System on 500GB SATA hard drive

There is a connected SATA hard drive (NTFS)

 

iATKOS installation settings:

 

EFI in Darwinboot

Vanilla Kernel

AppleSMBios kext

ATI driver found somewhere in the forums

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Trance2007
Trance2007
Posted
Posted

Hey Folks,

 

It is really nice to hear that you got rid of crashing LEO OSX problem by running 3 GB RAM instead of 4 GB RAM. Could you please all keep update if your systems are still running stable with 3 GB ram till so far? I also really wonder that Azureus torrent app is still installed ? Coz I really have serious doubts about Azureus keep crashing LEO....

 

Thanks in advance.

 

Trance2007

Link to comment
Share on other sites
ZosoM3
ZosoM3
Posted
  • Author
Posted

Since taking out the 4th 1GB ram module, my system has been 100% stable. Every program that would cause a crash (for me) in the past runs fine including:

iTunes

iPhoto

Spotlight

Finder

 

 

I'm currently up and running Parallels to my already installed XP drive with 1GB RAM allocated for Windows. All runs great. It's nice to finally use Leopard without worrying about crashing. I have Azureus installed in Leopard and it ran fine for the few hours I needed it open to download something.

 

 

It's interesting to note that the Dual Channel / 4GB RAM problem is consistant across both iAtkos and Kalyway.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
LeonDEpro
LeonDEpro
Posted
Posted

Hi Trance, just replied ur message and gonna update here, too:

 

My Kalyway 10.5.1 is now 100% stable!

 

Here's my crashed-for-sure-but-now-100%-perfect app list:

iMovie

iPhoto

iTunes

VMware Fusion 1.1

 

Large files copying/moving never ever cause prob again, either.

 

p.s Here is how I found out about my 4GB RAM causing the crash (or maybe it's the biggest cause):

 

My first crash happened just 30mins after my 1st successful installation of Kalyway 10.5.1 when I was copying 24GB files from another NTFS partition. After other crashes happening when copying large files, I thought the crash might be caused by high activities of my HDD.

 

Then I tried to minimize my HDD activity by not doing any large file copying/moving, yet when I ran Windows XP in VMware Fusion with 2GB Ram allocated, Leo crashed again. Then again I tried many other options and only found the crash not happening so often after reducing the RAMs of Virtual XP to 512MB. --That's when I altered my focus to my RAM, especially that HDD activities have a lot to do with RAMs.

 

So I tried running apps that take a lot of RAMs, such as Photoshop, VMware Fusion, iTunes, Safari with several dozens of tabs opened, etc., then as shown in the RAM info displayed in activity monitor in Applications -> Utilities, my Leopard CRASHES EVERY TIME WHEN THE RAM OCCUPATION REACHES 3.25GB!

 

--If anyone w/ 4GB RAM installed experiences the same 3.25GB deadline, try removing one of ur RAM sticks. Good Luck!

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Apple Sauce
Apple Sauce
Posted
Posted

Team:

 

Here are a few updates / work arounds I've found while trying to resolve this nasty problem:

 

1) on my system (ga-p35-ds3r, 2x2gb geil ram, xfx geforce 7600 256, samsung 500gb SATA, wd 330gb ide, Brazilmac + efi v8.0 + vanilla kernel) going to single channel memory did not solve the problem. I consistently received the same grey curtain of death.

 

2) I did find an easier workaround them physically removing memory. I've used the boot flag "maxmem=3456" and I get a stable, crash-proof system (note: using maxmem=3584 fails ... so something under 3.5 GB is needed. I went to the nears 128M) I plan on putting this into /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist so I don't have to type it each time.

 

3) I did some testing in single user mode (memtest OS X http://www.memtestosx.org/) and found the system to be stable., My assumption is that means the issue is not the kernel.

 

4) I never get a panic log. According to Apple's site, this would only happen if the kernel itself causes the problem or an extension fails which prevents writing to the disk. Since point 3 precludes the kernel, it must be a kext problem (???)

 

Hope this helps.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
LeonDEpro
LeonDEpro
Posted
Posted

The boot flag thing is good news cos I really want my 4 sticks running...I've paid for all of them, right?

 

Thx, Apple Sauce, I'll try with putting the boot flag in com.apple.Boot.plist, too. And plz let me know when you're done.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
 Share
Go to topic listing
×
×
  • Create New...