Amiga.org
The "Not Quite Amiga but still computer related category" => Alternative Operating Systems => Topic started by: Karlos on December 05, 2004, 07:27:40 PM
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Hi,
As some of you may know I have to work with MacOS X at work. Today, during the routine copying of some files from my eMac to the server (running 10.3 Server) there was a timeout error and I had to cancel the operation.
"No big deal", I thought; the last few files were junk anyway. I then set about installing an airport extreme card in the emac used in the sales room (no untidy network cables allowed in there) and it all went swimmingy. Until I tried to connect to the server.
So, knowing the robustness and quality of MacOS X, I figured, "no bid deal, the server probably needs rebooting" - it's brainfarted once or twice in the past. Our networking guy left and in the meantime it's up to yours truly, hired as a web developer for my php/mysql/dhtml/java knowledge (I know jack about macs and not much more about networking) rather than this.
Luckily, our internet is handled by our router so the server going down is of no consequence for internet use. However there are lots of documents and user's work stored on it.
So, I went up into the loft and sure enough the G4 was sitting there with a "You need to restart your machine" message, in no less than five different languages, against a dark grey screen.
So I did. And the same screen reappeared. No matter what I did, this same screen appeared.
So I tried the safe boot. Same result. Fearing some HD invalidation, I tried booting from the OSX Server install CD to do a disk check. Still nothing...
Having consulted the manuals, online help etc. still no further on in solving it.
So I removed the HD and swapped it for another identical G4 mac and it booted fine. Said HD from server caused the twin G4 mac to fail as already described.
Getting desperate now I tried to use the server HD as a second drive to see if I could run a disk check utility then. But alas the failed HD completely inhibits the mac from functioning even when it's set up as a slave drive (and yes, I do know how to set drives up for master / slave - I'm not an average mac user :evilgrin: )
No safe boot, no boot from CD, network, USB, firewire, other HD as primary etc.
Now I know what they mean by "think different". You need to really do that to solve the sort of problems that take five minutes under Windows/AmigaOS/Linux etc.
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Did you ever repair permissions while you had this machine running, or do you wait for things to go wrong first? ;-)
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HopperJF wrote:
Did you ever repair permissions while you had this machine running, or do you wait for things to go wrong first? ;-)
Looking after the server was not my job. The network guy was pretty vigilant about these things so I expect they were OK.
I fail to see why broken permissions om the HD should make the system totally unusable in every way, even booting from CD. Furthermore, why were they so broken in the first instance?
However, again we see the Mac paragdim here. You need to remember to fix it when it isn't broken to stop yourself getting totally screwed when it is.
Any excuse to take the blame away from the OS, eh?
You can't deny it, even windows is better behaved when there is a problem.
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I like windows.... :-)
Mac...Well.....It is thinking differently...
and Amiga just RULES! :-D :-)
Yea, its weird how the whole OS acts up and it end up being a hard drive failure.... Thats what it was on a MAC i looked at, and had no suspition of the HD failing at all. We learn new things everyday.
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I fully expect the non-cooperation is deliberate. After all, how else are Mac support companies supposed to make any money?
I can see the design discussions:
Engineer Team Representive: "Well, Mr Jobbs, we eliminated most of the bugs in Panther now.."
Steve: "Ah, great great. Faster, stronger and better."
EPR: "There's only the hard fail things to finalize. We have developed a state of the art reporting tool that we can fit into the firmware and give the user a thorough diagnostic of any failure."
Steve (alarm bells ringing): "Does it give complicated output?"
EPR: "Well, it gives you a concise textual report, after all it needs to run in cases where the OS GUI services cannot be started."
Steve (anger rising): "Textual? You mean no GUI? That's bad. I mean having to soil ourselves with bash was bad enough, but expert users may need it and at least it runs after the essential cool eyecandy is started. This isn't Windows we are talking about here! What alternatives do we have?"
EPR (loosens collar slightly): "Well, we could just refuse to boot up and display a nice error picture for the same amount of bios storage space, throw in a few languages explaining there was a 'problem'..."
Steve (calming): "Yeah, go on..."
EPR: "but of course it would be about as useful as a chocolate oven tray."
Steve: "No, no, I disagree. The user doesn't need to worry about such things. After all, we do have to consider our registered support technicians, do we not?"
EPR: "I'll tell the team to go with the big power button logo and multilingual text then...."
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Not particularly, repairing permissions is only a maintenance task like running ScanDisk or Disk Defragmenter on Windows...
I repaired my permissions for the first time sice I bought the machine last year, just today
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Are you suggesting that some bad file permissions (considering it was last "repaired" under a week ago) should be enough to bring the OS to its knees to the extend that you can't even boot from another device so long as the hard drive is attached?
If that's the case, OSX is even worse that I thought!
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repairing Mac OS X is a routine task is it HopperJF? Oops. :-)
The last times I can remember Win2k or XP being brought to its knees (ie. not boot properly) were as follows:
1) A customer had a dying hard disk. Bad sectors all over the place. I needed to do a disk check in the recovery console, but hard errors obviously persisted.
2) (another customer) a dodgy USB device (because the x86 architecture doesn't sandbox USB at all, pretty stupid IMO, considering USB's basic functions, eg. hot-swap PnP) caused erratic booting.
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Check the memory in the system. If you have had one go bad on you it can make all kinds of havoc for a Mac. They are very picky about ram working or not.
Also, look online for a reference to the "secret" OpenFirmware controls for a Mac. If you hold some odd key combinations (I think its like command-O-F) you will get into the Bios control. But be warned, you can completely screw the Mac if you change any of the wrong settings. I myself have not dabbled in it, just read about it a bit. I don't want to kill my G5 for the fun of messing around.
I would also disconnect any extra USB or Firewire devices too. Until there was a recent firmware update, my G5 1.6 would have some issues forgetting the USB was there and the mouse and keyboard would stop responding completely. Turned out that a simple fix was to use a powered USB hub, or to remove the original 256megs of Apple ram that was in the machine and just have my 2 x 512 sticks and it would behave itself. No big deal though now, a couple weeks later, Apple fixed the firmware and its been peachy ever since.
Good luck to you.
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@JetFire
Thanks. As it goes, I've checked the harware out - everything seems fine. It will boot from another HD containing OSX 10.3 no problem. As I said, it purely seems to be a problem with the Hard Disk or its contents.
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I've seen a few instances where Macs tend to "forget" user permissions and for some stange reason they will, on occaision, fail to load the LDAP services required to access Active Directory (multi OS network), but in this case I would be looking in the direction of the harddrive itself, as the problem moves from machine to machine, and is still present even when the drive is not used as a boot device. You might be able to mount the drive in a PeeCee running Linux and copy the contents of the drive, then download the Ultimate Boot CD (http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/) and run that to check if the drive is totally stuffed.
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> You need to really do that to solve the sort of problems
> that take five minutes under Windows/AmigaOS/Linux etc.
Oki. I can safely assume that you never faced such a problem
under Windows then. It's a *BITCH* to solve... Same with
AmigaOS and FFS, trying to salvage all your old files.
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Actually I had a similar problem but the disk was electricaly defective no other machine could boot even when conected to windows XP machine.
ofcourse if you conectit to windows it will trash the RDB and you could wave bye to the disk except if disk warrior can fix it .
I work as a mac technician for about 5 years and belive me mac os classic was a nightmare for users and haven for technicians, Macos X are heaven for users and nightmare for technicians!!
anyway the OS is good behaved and that are you saing point to hardware disk failure.
X server is far from perfect but belive me is more stable that windows server and you can configure it in less that 5 minutes having open directory services DNS services 10 virtual domain with smtp,pop,imap and 100 users.
Linux is more complete because doesn't have teething problems like OS X server but you need time to learn and more time to configure this.
Anyway its always a matter of taste! I 'm using OS X to my company and OSx server(with mirror raid via hardware) and I'm using PC with windows in my home my Amiga for the most common tasks again in my home and PC with debian for router on my Access Point and Back Bone links servicing the wireless Network community here in thessaloniki.
Just find for yourself what does the job better for the time/money you have and you will have your own conclusion.
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AmiGR wrote:
> You need to really do that to solve the sort of problems
> that take five minutes under Windows/AmigaOS/Linux etc.
Oki. I can safely assume that you never faced such a problem
under Windows then. It's a *BITCH* to solve... Same with
AmigaOS and FFS, trying to salvage all your old files.
Wrong on both counts. Both the PC and amiga could still be booted at least. Of all the OS's I ever worked with, only MacOS X has refused to boot from any device just because there is a HD in the system that is having trouble.
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@Thread
Don't get me wrong, when it's working, OSX is fine. However, when it is not working it is the absolute pits!
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I use macs at work, being an Apple tech and all :)
What I would do is run a disk repair util on the drive like Disk Warrior or Nortons Disk Docotor. They can be booted from the CDs they came on on your G4 system. See what they have to say about the disk. If you dont have one of those apps connect the drive to a machine that has a good working copy os OS X on it and use the Repair Disk function from Disk Utility on it and see what that does.
If I was to make a wild guess at whats going on I would have to say the the hard drive is failing.
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Wrong on both counts. Both the PC and amiga could still be booted at least. Of all the OS's I ever worked with, only MacOS X has refused to boot from any device just because there is a HD in the system that is having trouble.
I've had a 40MB scsi drive that did much as you explain, but on my Amiga. With it plugged in, the machine would lock up part way through booting. When it was unplugged, everything was fine. Not having any backups and without a way to get anything off it, I just put it aside.
Later, the same drive had the same effect on a powermac 8100. It would boot, but lock up when trying to query the scsi bus. That was enough of a hint to me that the drive was screwed up in an electronic sense, and I threw it :)
In any case, if you need data off the drive (or to satisfy curiosity - perhaps format/resurrect it) stick it in a PC and see if it can avoid the problems the mac is having. It may cause problems there, or may not.
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I had a similar problem with my iMac G4. I'd only had it two weeks when OS X stopped working. It would boot, and I'd be presented with the backdrop picture and a mouse pointer and nothing else.
I tried to boot from an OS X install CD, and it would not even recognise the CD inserted in the drive. I thought maybe the CD was damaged, so I bought a new copy of OS X. Still it wouldn't recognise the CD (on the screen where you can choose which drive to boot from, only the Hard drive was visible).
After maybe 10 calls to Apple Support (who were pretty clueless) they sent a guy to collect it and it was back with me the day after, with a note saying they'd replaced the hard drive.
Apparently the broken hard drive had also stopped the Mac from noticing there was a CD inserted.
So what use are disk repair tools that boot from CD if you can't boot from CD because your hard disk is faulty.
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I regenerated the problem with bad disk causing the same effect and I found a solution.
you need to stick the problematic HD to an external Firewire case and boot from another internal HD or CD by holding C as the mac startup.
The other way around didn't worked. By sticking a good drive with an OSX on the firewire and the bad disk on the internal IDE the mac couldn't boot.
Try what I say and tell us the result.
I belive it will work on your mac also but I cannot guarantie that you will get your lost data.. anyways a test can't harm you more that 10-20 minutes loss.
Hope for the best! ;-)
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Thanks for the tips. I think we have a firewire drive housing someplace.
If not, do you know if it is possible to shove the drive in another Mac and start it up as a firewire drive (I remember doing this to transfer some data from an old iMac)?
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Yo Karlos!
Here's the one, two three:
1-If a Mac will boot with the drive connected then...
Alsoft's Diskwarrior has a patented system of rebuilding the b-tree. Use it and you might be able to simply bring it back to life in it's present form
2-If the Mac will boot with the drive connected, but doesn't/will not mount, or you don't want to get Diskwarrior, or behaves very erratically on reads/write then Data Rescue.
(http://www.prosofteng.com/)
This little number ($50 USD) has come through a couple of times for me and it's $40 cheaper than Diaskwarrior. It will not restore the drive in place, but you WILL recover "en mass." I was able to recover 90% of a 160GB drive than neither Apple's Disk first aid, nor Diskwarrior would repair. It is great.
3-If computer won't even boot and hardlocks the problem is hardware. Either the drive itself or one of the other components.
I've had this happen on a PC once. The computer wouldn't boot w/ the drive attached.
I also had a case where a sketchy firewire enclosure would cause the drive to mount sometimes and then not other times. This corrupted the b-tree, but with Data Rescue and a working firewire enclosure, I recovered almost everything, formatted the drive and it is still in service.
I have also dealt with various interface cards causeing system lockups w/ a certain drive (but perhaps not another).
So... A problem like you are haveing is NOT the OS, but must be hardware.
Let me know if you would like any specific help. I've worked on Macs since my days when an A2000 was my prefered choice. :)
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Mac's Blow chunks. The One button mouse is the first turn off. Not to mention not ergonomic. The UI is "OK" but some things are backwards and configuration is so limited it's sickening. Why is Mac preferred by graphics people? I have no idea whatsoever. An upgraded PC can do anything a Mac can do. Don't like use Windows? Use Linux. Mac needs to die.
:)
Thanks,
Neofree
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@McNorris
Thanks for the heads up there. Reaing your post I'd have to say it's most like case (3). To recap
The machine will not boot when the drive is attached to either IDE chain and regardless of master/slave device configuration on either chain. It will not boot if there is already a functioning bootable hard drive present (and you are using the dodgy drive as a slave).
By "will not boot", I mean the machine stops with a message saying it must be restarted. You cannot boot from CD.
In short, having the drive attached to the system (via the IDE) is sufficient to render the system completely useless.
I've isolated the problem as far as the drive (or it's contents) having swapped it between several identical G4 systems.
I've yet to try that firewire idea, however.
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neofree wrote:
Mac's Blow chunks. The One button mouse is the first turn off. Not to mention not ergonomic. The UI is "OK" but some things are backwards and configuration is so limited it's sickening. Why is Mac preferred by graphics people? I have no idea whatsoever. An upgraded PC can do anything a Mac can do. Don't like use Windows? Use Linux. Mac needs to die.
:)
Thanks,
Neofree
How on earth does that help Karlos solve the problem he is having?? Why even bother wasting valuable bandwidth with crap like that??? :-? :-? :-?
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@adz
Don't worry dude. I spent a good portion of the last 2 days badmouthing all things Mac and wasted some of this thread myself :lol:
Of all the problems to get lumbered with literally days after the network guy left. Sod's law I tell you!
Hmmm, maybe he saw it coming :-D
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@Karlos
Its all good, I just get a little peeved with crap like that, its not the first time I've had a go at someone for that and I'm sure it won't be the last. It would be all fine if this thread was titled "Macs are crap...have at it...", but its not.
Of all the problems to get lumbered with literally days after the network guy left. Sod's law I tell you!
Hmmm, maybe he saw it coming :-D
AU$10 says he saw the exact same message as you and after a few failed reset attempts hightailed it out of there :lol:
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@Karlos
If he hadn't already hinted that he had simular feelings, I would have never said that. I too have had to troubleshoot Mac's and was left wondering WHY???
Apologize if offended.
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@adz
Yeah, maybe he did. It was suspiciously soon after he left.
It actually happened during a routine saving of data from one of the eMacs to the server.
TBH, the machine that is being used as the server isn't up to the job IMHO - its just a basic G4 box and doesn't even have RAID. Asking for trouble there, methinks :-)
@neofree
Relax dude, no offense taken. Like I said, I was about ready to take a brick to the thing myself :lol:
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TBH, the machine that is being used as the server isn't up to the job IMHO - its just a basic G4 box and doesn't even have RAID. Asking for trouble there, methinks :-)
You gotta wonder where some peoples brains are to put so much faith into something with absolutly no redundancy, even though RAID wouldn't have helped in this case, you never know when a drive is gonna just up and die on you. People will never learn, I suppose thats good in a way, keeps me employed :-D
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@Adz
Are you sure raid wouldn't have helped? You'd have several other drives intact all with the same data on them ;-)
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I had a problem with my Amigs running SFS where it threw a guru while browsing the web (IBrowse can be real flaky unless the stack settings are spot on, doh!) and the machine would continually crash upon reboot.
There was absolutely no way I could access the drive, I couldn't even boot with no startup and view the partition.
The only way I could get my Amiga to boot was to disable the errant drive in the early startup screen or to boot from floppy, whereby the machine wouldn't recognise the drive anyway. Either way the data was lost as I had to reformat the drive and start from scratch, but hey that just proves the importance of regular backups, right?
Anyway, I discovered the problem was limited to partitions on my Samsung and Fujitsu drives, which repeatedly lunched themselves in a similar fashion. My elderly Western Digital 420Mb Hdd would happily survive a guru in the middle of a read/write and would boot with no problems.
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@Karlos
Assuming that, in this case, it is data corruption that has caused the "server" to crap its dacks, then that same corrupt data would have been written to all other drives. Subsequently, you would have a pile of drives with the same corrupt data, no matter what RAID level you are running. Even if the drive had developed bad sectors, more than likely some form of garbled data would have been written to the other drives, hence again you would have pile of useless drives. I was having this exact same conversation with someone else the other day.
Edit...Actually, yes, RAID 1 would be beneficial here, as you would have more drives to play with, without totally loosing everything in the event of a stuff up :-D
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@Adz
Ah. I was thinking more in the line of filesystem errors resulting from messsed up drive sectors. But as you say, filesystem errors resulting from the server bombing out would have shagged the lot.
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@Karlos
Even still, you need a pretty beefed up RAID card to give at least a degree of protection against bad sectors on a hard drive, look at what happened to AW.net recently, I assume they were using RAID 5 at least.
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Probably a good start would be to use an OS that isn't likely to trash its own disk and then get all petulant about booting when the disk it's done the dirty on is still connected....
Honeslty, it's like a spoiled kid :lol:
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Honeslty, it's like a spoiled kid :lol:
Find me an OS that isn't ;-)
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@Neofree
I wouldn't ever buy a Mac with the OS9 {bleep}. Now, with OSX, it's a totally different story, I'm gonna buy one soon. Two button mice ARE supported, there's extensive configuration (even if some is using the console, a world's first for a Mac;-) and the system **IS** fast. BTW, about graphics people, they have a very simple reason. Macs just work. They need nothing else. Another reason is that there are global Gamma and colour calibration settings, something NOT available in win. For musicians and sound people, OSX features the *BEST* sound system on ANY platform. Not to mention the Graphics Core on 10.4... Everyone was talking about using the GPU for pixel accurate image manipulation, Apple goes on to implement it.
And no, Linux does *NOT* cut it for musicians and gfx artists. I'm on linux right now, there's no good program for multitrack stuff and ALSA is seriously {bleep}ed.
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neofree wrote:
Mac's Blow chunks. The One button mouse is the first turn off. Not to mention not ergonomic. The UI is "OK" but some things are backwards and configuration is so limited it's sickening. Why is Mac preferred by graphics people? I have no idea whatsoever. An upgraded PC can do anything a Mac can do. Don't like use Windows? Use Linux. Mac needs to die.
:)
Thanks,
Neofree
You have no Idea what you are talking about. You can change anything in OSX you want to using Shapeshifter. It can look as goos as the best AmigaOS custom look or better. Dont like the single button? Hey ANY USB mouse you like then. They all work on Mac and with all the functions of a PC. The graphics people like them because they are stable and the hardware is tied to the OS. Unlike Windows and the billions of configurations you could run into. Linux? I think not. OSX is based on BSD. Just about anything that runs on PPC Linux can compile and run on OSX. Have you even used an OSX machine? I mean USED one not just toyed in an Apple store for a few mins.