Panther: Screen saver freezes (again)

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
May 19th, 2004 • 10:48 pm

Yup. It’s happened again. Tried to woke my G4 from (display) sleep this morning. Got the frozen screen saver animation frame. Had to do a hard reset.

It definitely looks like this problem is completely independent from the freezes that I used to get while working, which appear to have been linked to a defective hard drive. I haven’t experienced those since removing the defective hard drive entirely. (That’s one piece of good news anyway!)

I have now changed my “Security” settings so that the computer doesn’t ask for my password when I wake the displays from sleep. We’ll see if that makes any difference.

(For the record, even though it might be totally unrelated, the USB ports on my secondary display are dead again, and have been so for several days and through several restarts now.)

Ah, the joys of troubleshooting.


3 Responses to “Panther: Screen saver freezes (again)”

  1. Clint MacDonald says:

    Pierre:

    If these errors seem like likely suspects, some easy troubleshooting seems in order. Remove all USB devices (including and especially hubs) except your mouse and keyboard, reboot, and see if you have any further problems. If not, add back USB devices until the problem recurs.

    Of course, since your crashes are sporadic, troubleshooting will never be as easy as I describe, but it’s a place to start.

    Best wishes,
    Clint

  2. Pierre Igot says:

    Thanks for the advice, I’ll try when I get the chance. But I am starting to suspect that these USB messages are the symptom rather than the cause. Indeed, looking back at the logs for the past few days, these messages are all over the place. And they coincide with the fact that the USB ports on my second display are not working. So it seems pretty clear to me that the USB error messages are generated because Mac OS X is unable to get the ports on the display to respond properly. I am pretty sure that, if I disconnect that display altogether, the messages will disappear. But they seem not to be related to the freeze, since they are occurring right now, and the computer is working fine otherwise (including the screen saver and the sleep feature).

    I find the fact that Mail crashed in the middle of the night more suspicious. Oh, it’s all very frustrating!

  3. Pierre Igot says:

    Aha! Examining my system log this morning, I find a whole series of lines such as this one:

    May 20 01:35:10 G4 kernel: USBF:	296717.282	
    AppleUSBOHCI[0x22bd800]::MakeDevice error setting address. err=0xe00002ed
    device=0x4798c00 - releasing device

    The device numbers mentioned in these lines do not match any of the product IDs mentioned in the System Profile, but maybe these are two different kinds of numbers… Interestingly, the USB errors start at 21:30, when I was still using the machine. (I never noticed anything.)

    I also see a Mail crash at 23:29. The USB errors continue until 02:03 am, then nothing.

    Unfortunately, I am not sure what I can do with this information. Maybe a bug report to Apple?

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