Hi Bruce,
I'm keeping the full reply here on the 1st list, for now, so others can chip in with suggestions, if I miss something. If they complain, we can move it private.
At 09:37 PM -0700 10/20/2004, Bruce Godfrey wrote:
At 07:46 AM -0700 10/20/2004, Bruce Godfrey wrote:I have been struggling with system 8.6 on my 6100 for some time now. I finally decided to check with the 1st-powermacs list for help. I can't run any of my collection of web browsers for more than 15 or 20 minutes without getting the "XYZ has unexpectedly quit. You should save your work..." message. I also get frequent errors of type 1 and some type 2.
I have IE5.1.6, Communicator 4.79, Mozilla 1.0, and iCab 2.9.8. I did the Text Encoding Converter update to 1.5, as the iCab readme recommends. Other than that I am running on a freshly reformatted hard drive and a freshly installed copy of 8.6. IThe system is from an OEM 8.5 disk, and then the downloadable 8.6 update was run. This 6100 has a Sonnet 400MHz G3 and 256 Mb RAM installed. It has always run well on 8.1 or 7.6.1, but has been flaky since I have upgraded to OS 8.6.
Run Disk First Aid. Ensure there are no problems on any of your volumes.
I just did a complete re-formatting, including the low-level format, ran disk first aid and drive set-up versions supplied with the 8.5 installer disk, and a clean and complete recommended easy install of 8.5 and the 8.6 upgrade. If anything, the flakiness has gotten worse asince the clean install.
From your Stdlog, the OS installation looks ok. I see two possibilities now: a hardware problem or software application problem. Of course, the app problem could be caused by a data corruption problem... Eudora is particularly sensative to those. More below.
Additional recomms herein are to narrow possibilities down. If after doing them, you have another crash, please send me that stdlog.
Bruce wrote via direct email:
oddly difficult to type in the StdLog command in the MacsBug command line. The lightest touch of the keyboard gave a string of the letter I touched. I had to peck like a rabid chicken and use the delete key in order to get the command entered. Is that normal behaviour?
ew. Hate it when that happens! No, it's not "normal", it's indicative of the type of crash you had tho.
Keyboard key presses don't just "appear" in the computer once, so they require the use of a "debounce" routine to tell the difference between a simple key-press and a longer key-hold (which means you want the character to repeat). In the case of this particular crash - where the system heap was corrupted - MacsBug felt it could no longer trust the system's debounce routine. So you were un-debounced, er a bounced. :)
...If you want to poke around within MacsBug a bit... While you're NOT connected to the 'net, press cmd-Power. That will drop you into MacsBug. Then try the "help" command. Use the "G" command to return to normal operations.
Bruce also said via direct email:
Anyway, it checked the heap for everything that was running and found a fault with the system heap. The block didn't point back at itself, or something to that effect. Could it be that I have a bad OS installer CD? Or is it maybe a coincidence that the RAM location the System loads into is bad? A list poster suggested checking for a RAM hardware problem today.
The heap death definately could have been caused by a bad piece of RAM. It's not a bad OS installation issue. If you have a tool like PowerControl or TechTool, running their memory tests overnight might be a good idea. If you no gots, look here:
<ftp://pcp02336381pcs.echryh01.nj.comcast.net/tools/>
<ftp://pcp02336381pcs.echryh01.nj.comcast.net//pub/tools/PowerControl 3.0.0.sit>
...(That be my private ftp)
Um... Couple more config changes:
TCP/IP control panel. Click on Options and make sure "load only when needed" is NOT checked.
Remote Access control panel. To connect to the 'net, open this cdev then leave it open. Be sure to NOT close it while your modem connection is active. This provides the PPP module with an application heap to do it's work.
And please disable the Control Strip for now. It has two pieces that need to be pulled: "Control Strip" in the Control Panels folder and "Control Strip Extension" in the Extensions folder.
Memory cdev settings?
If you mean by cdev the memory control panel, virtual memory is turned on, set at 1Mb more than actual RAM, the disk cahe is at default setting of 8 Mb, and a RAM disk is also present, set at 13 Mb.
Good. Please turn off the RAM Disk for now.
...What are you using the RAM Disk for?
What version of CarbonLib do you have installed?
That is a good question. I had previously installed a version more recent than waht comes with teh 8.6 installer. Maybe this is part of why things seem even worse after the clean install. I looked in the extensions folder and system flder and can find no CarbonLib at all. Sherlock doesn't find it in the internal drive either. I used to have 1.6, and there was also a 1.3.1 version on one of the other partions of trhe external drive, probably frm the system 9.1 install.
That's fine. OS 8 doesn't install CarbonLib by default. And if the apps you use aren't crying for it at launch, then you don't need it. If you should, then you want to use the most recent (1.6).
If you're touching any web pages that contain Flash, at any time, what version of Flash do you have installed?
Just the version 5 Flash Player that comes with Communicator 4.79.
Please locate the plug-in files for this and drag them to your desktop. Since I'm trying to concentrate on iCab, please check both iCab's plug-in folder and check within the "Internet Plug-Ins" folder in the System Folder (if any).
I had the same thing happen on my 7300 when I had multiple OSeseses. There is a bug, not fixed until OS 9.2, whereby the Startup Disk control panel fails to fully change the drive:volume boot pair in the PRAM. Very annoying.
This _is_ interesting. It would explain why I keep hearing drive access activity on the external drive, where 9.1, 8.1, and 7.6.1 system folders exist on separate partitions.
The Startup Disk cdev / PRAM bug makes it annoyingly difficult for the bootstrap to find which disk/volume/system folder to boot upon. The quest for bootness can take a while. :\ So it would account for xtra disk access you see *before* the "happy mac" icon appears during boot. Any extra disk accesses on the other drives/volumes you see during the boot thereafter are either the file system mounting the drive/volume then pre-loading the disk cache or 3rd party extensions searching for their pieces, then finally, as the Finder loads, it's the desktop database files being opened and verified.
And why some of the error codes I get involve the bus (that is no. 1, I think).
The lower bus-error numbers are simply software addressing errors *to* the *memory* bus. They have nothing to do with memory failure or things on your i/o busses or HDs. They are software application bugs, such as bad pointers, runaway loops, etc. Terrible choice of error message text on Apple's part. Better than "press any key" or "an error occured", I supposed tho.
Thing is when all I had were 7.6.1, and 8.1, there were no problems. Then I skipped up to 9.1 and it seemed like it took many restarts before I could get any other disk (partition) besides the one with 9.1 to work as the start up volume. Then I decided 9.1 was not a good idea and installed 8.6, hoping that would be the best compromise between the old and the new.
Try zapping your parameter RAM. That fixes it temporarily, usually.
I haven't done that recently, but if it is just a temporary fix, then my quest is not over.
Do you think I should just entirely trash that 9.1 system folder on the external drive? Will that help make this stop, or does 8.6 also have the boot pair problem? I have not yet had 8.6 installed without 9.1 having been in the background.
The systems you have installed elsewhere have nothing to do with the problems you're experiencing. When the Mac isn't booted on them, they're just folders full of files - that's all. Nothing special about them.
- Dan.
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