Leopard crashes non-stop. Troubleshooting ideas?

[carlos228]

I had those issues too. The solution was simply not to put anything on the IDE (P-ATA) ports!

Now I have a perfect stable system: Gigabyte GA35 - DS4 with 8 GByte RAM and Q6600 @3.4 GHz. (RAM is 4 x 2 GByte OCZ platinum 800 @840)

The good thing is you CAN use the both (purple) S-ATA ports of the jmicron, so the Board still provides 8 S-ATA ports. Just put everything to AHCI in BIOS and leave the jmicron.kext where it is. No crashes as long no IDE device is installed.

For CD-ROM and older HDs I recommend a cheap IDE to S-ATA Adapter.

[javierv94]

I wanted to echo Carlos228 in that with my system ASUS P5K-E, running Kalyway 10.5.2 and applied the 10.5.3 update last night without a glitch. JUST REMEMBER at reboot time to type the command they tell you in the PDF.

 

My system has 4 gigabytes of DDR at 800 Mhz, 500GB Maxtor SATA2, Serial ATA Pioneer DVD drive, and Nvidia 7600 256MB card, I was getting crashes about every 15-20 minutes. I had one IDE drive connected from my old computer which I needed to move the old data. Migration assistant would crash half way through it so I had to do it manually. My USB Drive case was not working so I didn't have that option.

 

The first clue about IDE came from not being able to install Kalyway from it. Basically trying to boot via IDE and the JMicron is not supported by 10.5 (I think). So I was lucky my local computer parts folk has a sale for a Pioneer SATA drive for only $25. I also have a ATI Radeon 2600 PCI-E but couldn't get it to display correctly so I used my old Nvidia card.

 

Well I was able to pull all the needed data files from my IDE Seagate 250GB drive after maybe 10 reboots. After that I removed the IDE drive and left it running over night to see what would happen. It didn't crash!

 

So this seems to be consistent with other people.

I also left my USB 2.0 Pocket Drive connected all night to see if there was a problem with the USB ports. Confirmed there was no problem. Also left it connected to Ichat, databases, etc... and nothing was disconnected. Left my Isight Firewire Camera, no problem.

 

I did apply the latest Nvidia Drivers for 10.5 which you can find here.

 

http://scottdangel.com/blog/?p=21

 

But honestly not sure if this made a difference. The reason I installed the drivers was when I rebooted after the 10.5.3 Kalyway update I noticed in System Profiler > Graphics and Displays my Core Image did NOT show Hardware Accelerated nor did Quartz Extreme show supported. Itunes visualizer seem to work fine but I wanted to make sure this was working.

 

It might have worked without it but so hard to tell exactly what was causing the crashes without a debugger.

 

Since these posts are searchable, I wanted to let you know I bought originally the ASUS P5K-EPU or sometimes written as P5K/EPU which is an energy efficient board from ASUS. It claims to be able to set the SATA to AHCI in the bios even in the printed manual. However, the option was removed and will not show up in the setup. But I was not able to get it to boot no matter if I updated or downgraded the bios. Perhaps with more time it might have worked but I haven't seen any successful installs yet. So avoid this board if you have a chance. I was able to exchange it at my local dealer at no cost.

 

Thanks again for all the people who post who end up saving us lots of hours!!

[ototo]

It goes in the "Kenerl Flags" section inbetween the <string></string> delimiter (see below. The red text shows where it should go).

 

 

 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">

<plist version="1.0">

<dict>

<key>Kernel</key>

<string>mach_kernel</string>

<key>Kernel Flags</key>

<string>maxmem=3456</string>

<key>Timeout</key>

<string>5</string>

</dict>

</plist>

 

Thx a lot,

 

I'm running on 4gb now, if i want to install more ram do i need to change "<string>maxmem=3456</string>"

 

I'm sorry if it sounds stupid, but I'm new at this.

[scorpioserve]

I have as ASUS P5PE-VM it does not have very many BIOS Settings, so I cannot test alot of things but it has 2 ram slots that take DDR 400 ram, it only support 1gig chips, I have always run the machine even as a pc with 2 x 1gig chips, when I changed to os x I crashed every 30mins or so, I have tried Kalyway, iAtkos and JaS Ibut nothing helps, It has 2 SATA HDs running and an IDE DVD Drive, and a Geforce 6600 agp8x card, the only way I have managed to stop it from crashing is to take out one of the ram chips to force it to go into single channel mode, is there anything else somebody can suggest, maybe put back the ram and disable all cd drives for a while so itr is only running on sata or could I possible put a 512 chip into the second slot so it still does not use dual channel, I am a bit stuck with this one, memtest with both chips installed succeeds

 

Please help

Maybe someone could take a look at my bios and see if I am missing something

 

http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/socket...609_p5pe-vm.pdf

 

any help would be appreciated

[lotrfan]

Hey guys, I'm having the same problem with the GSOD, but with a few plot twists. Maybe someone will have an idea ;-).

 

First, here's my specs:

Foxconn M7PMX-S nVidia 630i chipset Geforce 7100 integrated

Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0Ghz

2GB RAM DDR2 800 (single stick) shared with graphics chip

500GB SATA drive running in AHCI mode

LG IDE DVD drive

 

I installed Kalyway 10.5.2 last night and it's crashed two times during the 8 or so hours that it was running. I accidentally deleted the HFS+ partition on my 80GB external USB hard drive during an earlier XP install (I wiped it when I installed Leopard), and I was using testdisk to create an image to recover the data. The first time it got to about 10% and crashed. The second time I let it run overnight and when I woke up this morning, it had crashed at about 70%. I checked the crash logs, and they all say something about Spotlight.

 

So here's what I'mthinking: Spotlight was mentioned earlier, but didn't really seem to be the case.

 

Hard drive activity was also considered, but Activity Monitor tells me I'm transferring at about 8MB per second constantly and testdisk got all the way to 70% the second time, which means that probably isn't it.

 

It could be a problem with my hardware, but right now, I haven't tried to install any drivers for LAN or audio, nor have I tried to go online or play music or anything like that that might conflict with the system. Also, I am transferring data onto a SATA drive in AHCI mode, so even if I had an IDE problem, I don't think I would have noticed.

 

Also, I only have a single stick of DDR2 RAM, which would have solved everyone else's problem.

 

So this leaves me with a suspect: the 630i chipset, or more precisely, the integrated 7100. Currently, I have it set on 256MB of RAM, and when I still had XP, the RAM amount visible in system properties showed up as 1.75GB. In addition to the amount you set for the integrated video, the system told me that it would use additional RAM that would be shared with the OS for a total of up to 500-600MB or so. However, in Leopard when I click About This Mac, the RAM shows up as 2GB, not 1.75GB. Activity Monitor displays 2.00 GB below the System Memory pie chart, but if I add up the total memory Free and Used, it comes out to be 1.75GB. I think it's perhaps these discrepancies in the RAM amount that are causing the problem, say, if the system accidentally tries to access part of the 256MB set apart solely for the integrated video. And seeing as I don't have any drivers installed for the video card, nor can I find any that work (I've installed Leopard on here before, and I've tried all sorts of nVidia drivers), I highly suspect this is the cause.

[Donjuanjack]

It might be your power supply unit being not powerful enough..creating an unstable system...or you are overclocking your system too much

 

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?