Mac Problems

[dave2010]

I'm starting this thread in case any others ever have problems running Mac OS X.

Last night, for the first time in years, my Mac OS X 10.6 based iMac didn't seem to shut down properly. This morning it didn't start up properly either.

Using a trusty iPad which just happened to be lying around, I found the following:

1. Mac OS X has a Safe Mode. I didn't know this before - unlike Windows I'd never needed to worry.

2. I found the restart procedure for boot stalling Macs - which differs slightly between different versions.

The basic advice for OS 10.6 seemed to be
(a) Get the machine off. (Hold the power button in for a while.)
(b) Disconnect all the major peripherals - disc drives etc. and even the ethernet cables.
(c) Turn the machine back on, and it should boot.
(d) Gradually test each disconnected device until the problem area is located.

One problem here is that it might be possible to locate the problem, but not fix it. I'll cross that bridge when I get there.

3. Some people seem to recommend rebooting in Safe Mode, or doing some form of disc check manually, to reconfigure the directories. I think rebooting in Safe Mode does this anyway, but the procedure under 2. avoids Safe Mode so this step might need to be forced manually.

I'm hoping this is only a temporary glitch, but currently I've disconnected my media drive, and my Time Machine drive pending further consideration.

Things like this are scary, but compared with the amount of time I've wasted on Windows systems this is pretty small beer - provided of course I've not lost a significant amount of data. I'll scream in a day or so if that happens or has happened!

The machine is now running again - and I'm using it to type this post.

[webby]

Dave, your biggest problem is that you are running on borrowed space. You only have 20gb free out of 640gb. That's not enough. The system ideally needs 10% free space to run efficiently. At the moment, things will just gets worse. You need to move some stuff off of the internal drive. I haven't got time to go into it in great detail now, but I got your pm and will reply to that in due course.

Regards,

[dave2010]

Dave, your biggest problem is that you are running on borrowed space. You only have 20gb free out of 640gb.

Worked fine when I got down to 10 Gbytes! Maybe even 8. The spare space is now going up, not down! OK. I know!

I'll back off some videos and clear 100 Gbytes or so.

I just thought it was worth reporting here, as my guess is that unlike Windows users, most Mac users don't get to the awkward parts, of if they do, not very frequently.

Who else knew about Safe Mode on the Macs, or even thought it might be needed?

More in a few days.

[Smoker]

in case someone ever forgets their admin password, there's a handy guide here

[ikaruga]

Dave, your biggest problem is that you are running on borrowed space. You only have 20gb free out of 640gb. That's not enough. The system ideally needs 10% free space to run efficiently. At the moment, things will just gets worse. You need to move some stuff off of the internal drive. I haven't got time to go into it in great detail now, but I got your pm and will reply to that in due course.

Regards,

Never heard of this. I had OS X running at around 2gb free space for about a year with no ill effects until I bought an external hard drive and moved a load of stuff off the internal HD.

[webby]

Never heard of this. I had OS X running at around 2gb free space for about a year with no ill effects until I bought an external hard drive and moved a load of stuff off the internal HD.

Well then you we lucky. Either that or you didn't use memory intensive applications.