Mac Troubleshooting

Discussion in 'Technology' started by dark knight, Aug 26, 2007.

  1. dark knight

    dark knight Super Moderator
    Staff Member

    Dec 15, 1999
    Club:
    Leicester City FC
    This one is for Hamatachi...

    It seems all my Mac programs are crashing regularly - Itunes keeps corrupting it's library - any suggestions on utilities to run to figure out what's going on? Disk utility did not find errors.

    I'm using 10.4.
     
  2. Ringo

    Ringo Member

    Jun 10, 2002
    Rough and Ready
    Club:
    Yeovil Town FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    did you repair permsissions and stuff like that? I run a maintainence program called onyx every now and then to keep things running smoothly. it's a free download. go to versiontracker.com.
    I can't say for sure it'll help ... but you never know.
     
  3. dark knight

    dark knight Super Moderator
    Staff Member

    Dec 15, 1999
    Club:
    Leicester City FC
    Yeah - i tried repairing permissions and I also run macjanitor occasionally. I wonder if the hard drive is failing even though it doesn't detect errors.
     
  4. Sachsen

    Sachsen Member+

    Aug 8, 2003
    Broken Arrow, Okla.
    Club:
    Sporting Kansas City
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
  5. Dadinho

    Dadinho Member

    Feb 19, 2005
    San Diego
    Club:
    Vitoria Salvador
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Have you tried booting in single user mode and running fsck? I know it is essentially the same as running disk utility, but it might give you truer results.

    Single user mode
    1. Shut down the computer if it is on.
    2. Press the power button to start the computer.
    3. Immediately press and hold the Command (Apple) key and one of the following:
    the "s" key for single-user mode.
    the "v" key for verbose mode.
    4. To exit single-user mode type: reboot
    5. Press Return.
     
  6. Horsehead

    Horsehead Super Moderator
    Staff Member

    Nov 2, 2006
    Los Angeles
    My dad recently had what sounds like the exact same problem and it turned out to be the logic board. Backup and take it in before it totally fails if none of these software related fixes work. :(
     
  7. dark knight

    dark knight Super Moderator
    Staff Member

    Dec 15, 1999
    Club:
    Leicester City FC

    Thanks - dumb question - what is fsck?
     
  8. Dadinho

    Dadinho Member

    Feb 19, 2005
    San Diego
    Club:
    Vitoria Salvador
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    "file system check"

    Wikipedia explanation
     
  9. Dadinho

    Dadinho Member

    Feb 19, 2005
    San Diego
    Club:
    Vitoria Salvador
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    That is a possibility. I had to replace mine because the monitor would go blank a couple of minutes after logging in. For those that may not know, logic board is Mac's way of saying motherboard.
     
  10. dark knight

    dark knight Super Moderator
    Staff Member

    Dec 15, 1999
    Club:
    Leicester City FC
    Maybe that is it - I just had to reboot my computer so it seems to be getting worse. Any idea how much a replacement will cost? Can I justify convincing myself to splurge for a Mac Book Pro?
     
  11. Dadinho

    Dadinho Member

    Feb 19, 2005
    San Diego
    Club:
    Vitoria Salvador
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I, luckily, still had applecare, but looking at the bill it would've cost close to a grand. So, yeah, I think you can justify buying a new macbook.
     
  12. Horsehead

    Horsehead Super Moderator
    Staff Member

    Nov 2, 2006
    Los Angeles
    Mmm, but he said Macbook Pro which is a little harder to justify. It used to be the difference between the iBook and the Powerbook made the jump to a 12 inch Powerbook a smart move, but the the low end Powerbook (15 inch) is $2000 before you do anything, middle version is $2500.

    Is a video processor a must-have, hence the Pro? Or can you do with a MacBook? The specs aren't that different speedwise except for vid games.

    Hehe, we've gone straight from troubleshooting to shopping for DK's next computer. :p
     
  13. Dante

    Dante Moderator
    Staff Member

    Nov 19, 1998
    Upstate NY
    Club:
    Juventus FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I doubt it's the HD, when that's going you can usually hear clicking sounds coming from it.
     
  14. Horsehead

    Horsehead Super Moderator
    Staff Member

    Nov 2, 2006
    Los Angeles
    Argh, correction: Should have written MacBook Pro
     
  15. dark knight

    dark knight Super Moderator
    Staff Member

    Dec 15, 1999
    Club:
    Leicester City FC
    I have some bad news, I finally figured out that I need to run the repair disk from the Tiger disk - at first I thought I could do it just from a normal boot, and then I tried from my Panther disk but that kept giving errors because I had upgraded. So I ran the Tiger repair utility and it says it solved the problem. It's still possible that the motherboard is getting illogical, because the problem comes and goes, but I haven't had a chance to use it since the repair.

    The bad news is that maybe I don't need a new MacBook Pro? :(

    Does anyone know how to repair a damaged Itunes Library? It's irritating that I had never backed up my Library and lost all my playlists.
     
  16. Dadinho

    Dadinho Member

    Feb 19, 2005
    San Diego
    Club:
    Vitoria Salvador
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Leopard's Time Machine... ;)
     
  17. Kryptonite

    Kryptonite BS XXV

    Apr 10, 1999
    Columbus
    Club:
    Columbus Crew
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Dumb answer - A word you can't type due to the BigCensor.

    ;)
     
  18. IntheNet

    IntheNet New Member

    Nov 5, 2002
    Northern Virginia
    Club:
    Blackburn Rovers FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    knight: Try this; if, however, your iTunes library is completely hosed, try this to copy content back off your iPod to your computer in iTunes.
     
  19. dark knight

    dark knight Super Moderator
    Staff Member

    Dec 15, 1999
    Club:
    Leicester City FC
    So it turns out I think the memory I added recently went bad already. I was able to run techtools on it and it detected the bad memory.
     
  20. Scarecrow

    Scarecrow Red Card

    Feb 13, 2004
    Chicago
    Club:
    Chicago Fire
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Dk,
    You may want to look into a new machine. It is likely that the cause of your memory going bad has much to do with problems on the logic board. Could be voltage irregularities, or other related problems.

    My best advice is to make sure you keep a current backup.
     

Share This Page