Congratulations on an extended and finely documented description of a problem. Sadly I have no solution to offer. I wonder if you are running as a fusion drive with the SSD and partition on drive 2. Apple have never released the fusion bit built into the system, despite many years of promises. Having said that, I have not any worries with my iMac non Apple fusion drive. Hope you get this cleared up fast! Best wishes Severin
> On 12 Mar 2019, at 4:02 pm, Neil Houghton <[email protected]> wrote: > > Writing this from the laptop as my iMac has started playing up with strange > ‘freezes’ the likes of which I’ve never seen before – and I’ve had my share > of crashes, freezes & hangs over the years!! > > First my setup/hardware – which has been “enhanced” since purchase: > 27” iMac 2.8GHz i7 - late 2009 - running OSX 10.11.6 > 24GB RAM - 2x8GB + 2x4GB > Internal Drive 1 - Mercury Electra 250GB SSD - boot drive containing OSX, > applications and a bare “admin” user account > Internal Drive 2 - 3TB Toshiba partitioned as: > · 1.5TB volume - containing main user folder plus other data folders > · 1.0TB volume - currently empty (earmarked for media files) > · 500GB volume - containing my previous SL boot volume > > This has all been working fine since the rebuild to replace the HDs and boost > the RAM. > > I have been out of town for a couple of weeks but shut down the compute and > UPS and removed the plugs from the wall - so no chance of “power glitches” > while we were away. > > On return everything fired up OK (from memory) but pretty soon I had a freeze > - I don’t remember the exact sequence but, pretty soon I ended up with just a > black screen with a cursor. The cursor continued to respond to the mouse but > I could not “wake up” anything else. Command option escape would not open a > force quit window and I had no means of knowing if any apps were still > running. All I could do was power down using the power button on the back of > the iMac. > > All booted up OK but fairly soon I ran into problems - again I don’t > remember the exact sequence but I do remember the desktop going black whilst > some open window remained visible but soon I was back at the black screen & > cursor. Again, all I could do was power down using the power button on the > back of the iMac. At this point, I was worried that I might have some drive > problem so I rebooted from my backup clone and used disk utility to run first > aid on all drives/partitions. I ran top level on both internal drives and > then volume level on all four volumes - in all cases the repair went fine > with no issues noted. > > Back to booting normally and again all seemed fine - for awhile - until > another freeze - I just remember I was using Outlook this time. > > Sometime (I don’t remember when) during all this I remember Acrobat reader > opening - unprompted - a couple of times. The first time barely registered - > I just quit it - the second time made me think “why did it do that?” I was > also trying to research OSX black screen problems - I found plenty of > references to this problem but generally associated with incomplete system > updates and none with similar circumstances to mine. One common thread on a > numbers of these threads seemed to be down to some login problem which made > me go the user preference pane where I noticed two new Adobe items in the > login items list - which, I guess could explain the unexpected opening of > Adobe reader. I have now removed the Adobe items from the login items list > but my freeze problems persist and so this was probably non-related. > > > The latest freeze is now ongoing – around 1 hour and I know that only a > switch-off at the power button will get me out of it. > In this case the only app open was Firefox with two multi-tab windows on > screen and one multi-tab window minimised in the dock. It froze with the > spinning beach ball cursor – which still tracks the mouse movements. > Command-tab would not cycle me back to Finder. > Option-Command-Escape would not bring up the force-quit menu. > Mousing the cursor over the menu bar showed the spinning ball over all the > Firefox menu items but the normal pointer over the right-hand Apple & 3rd > party menu items. > I have the “fast user switching” menu item on so I clicked my user name to > open the drop-down switching menu (I wanted to check if this looked “normal”) > however, at that point most of the Apple menu items disappeared from the > menu-bar. The Spotlight icon was still showing but clicking that turned the > pointer to the beachball and, after a moment, the Spotlight icon also > disappeared. > At present, both Firefox windows are still showing and I can switch between > windows by clicking each window – but not between tabs within the window. > The menu bar still shows the left-hand Apple icon but the beachball cursor > when over it. The full Firefox menu also shows – but again with the beachball. > The Dropbox, 1Password, Malwarebytes and Onedrive menu icons are still > showing – but now with the beachball (although originally the shoed the > normal pointer cursor). > Screen sleep initiated normally and the screen awoke from sleep normally with > a keyboard input. > UPDATE: I have just shut down using the power button and rebooted and quit > the only reopened app (Firefox) and, for the moment, all looks fine. For the > moment, I will leave it running while I have lunch and see if runs into any > problems just sitting quietly doing nothing (from a user perspective!) > > UPDATE: Well, it has been running fine for a couple of hours now (but doing > nothing) including screen sleep and rewake and system sleep and rewake/login > - so I guess I will go back to using it and see if I can find any sort off > pattern to the problem. > > Any thoughts/ideas/suggestions gratefully received. > > > Cheers > > > Neil > > -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- > Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml > <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml>> > Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml > <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml>> > Settings & Unsubscribe - > <http://lists.wamug.org.au/listinfo/wamug.org.au-wamug > <http://lists.wamug.org.au/listinfo/wamug.org.au-wamug>> ________________________________ Assoc Prof Severin Crisp, FIP, FAIP Clarence Estate, 55 Hardie Rd, Albany, Western Australia, 6330 (Home: 15 Thomas St, Mount Clarence, Albany, Western Australia, 6330) Ph 0484 624 741 Email: [email protected] ________________________________
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