I'm not a good advertisement these days for the crash-proof
Macintosh OSX, of the 10.3.9 persuasion. SBBOD (the Spinning
Beach Ball of Death) forces a power-switch shutdown a half
dozen times or more daily. Boring. And depressing. I'm out
of ideas.

The problem seems to start with apps that access my external
FW hard drive (a LaCie D2 120gb). That's where I put stuff I
don't want or can't fit on my boot drive: the iTunes library
and backed-up commercial DVD files seem to be the culprits.

Environment: MDD G4 867DP; 1.25gb memory; 60gb HD in three
partitions: Main (30gb), "OS9" (26gb), eDrive (4gb); LaCie
FW400 d2 120gb; USB floppy and ZIP drives.

Symptoms: An app freezes with SBBOD. Other apps already open
seem unaffected. I cannot force quit the frozen app. It has
no discernible presence, but its dock icon still has the "I'm
active" triangle in the dock. No Finder process will work.
A power-button shutdown and startup keeps me going for a while.

On occasion, TechTool Pro reports a bad bitmap on the external.
Run from the boot drive, neither TTP nor Disk Warrior ever finds
a problem. Run from eDisk, TTP hardly ever finds a problem. DW
sometimes reports a directory error and can fix it.

This is symptomatic of a cache problem. I'm developing a close
personal relationship with TinkerTool System and YASU. No help.

Safe booting is no help.

Backing up the external and reformatting is no help.

Swapping out the external with another LaCie d2 120 is no help.

TechTool Pro and the G4's Hardware Test report no problems, but
I tried removing the new half-gig memory chip I got last month.
No help.

I tried my "alter ego" Emergency admin acct. No help.

It seems using iTunes or MTR or Toast7 (which access the hard
drive routinely) is guaranteed to cause the problem at some
point. Sometimes they work fine, sometimes it's a mid-op freeze.

I think maybe Finder (or one of its minions) is hosed.

I'm out of things to try. Except maybe an archive-and-install of
Panther and applying the 10.3.9 combo update. This will, of course
screw up things even worse until I get the old user stuff copied
properly and the newer Apple apps updated.

Any of you gurus with ideas?

Hi Al,
I would start by running the computer for a while with no peripherals attached.... no firewire, no USB. I realize you won't be able to run applictations like iTunes if your library is on the external, but you should first verify the computer itself is stable.
After you do this (and I hope successfully) I would plug just the external Lacie HD in and begin to use it as you would normally. If the problem returns you have at least isolated it to that one device.
If the Lacie seems to be working all right, then it may be one of the other devices or the way they are connected. Is anything daisy-chained or are you using any kind of external USB/Firewire hub? That too, could be a source of a problem. And I can't begin to tell of the bad experiences I've had with various Zip devices!
If you decide it's software related, instead of just A and I, why not first try reaplying the 10.3.9 combo updater? Other posters have detailed how to do that here.

Good luck and keep us posted.

Applal, it has been a pleasure running the beast all day with
no problems. I unplugged all (but one) of my externals, as you
suggested. I forgot about the iMic that connects external analog
sound sources (turntable, tape deck) to a USB port on the cpu. I
know it can be problematic. Our old Wallstreet is happy to import
sound via the iMic and a USB PCMCIA card, but it shuts off output
sound. Nonetheless, nothing untoward has happened.

The only continued Finder oddity was an inability to remember that
I'd re-sized or re-positioned windows. I didn't mention that this
morning. It seemed small potatoes.

I could indeed test iTunes. It defaults to ~/music/itunes/ when it
can't see the external HD. After I bring the LaCie back on line, I'll
just consolidate libraries. I also backed up a movie, having just
enough space on the startup HD to hold the intermediate files. Neither
MTR nor Toast7 burped. It took a while to test those apps, after which
Leslye and I went to the neighborhood pool for a bit of a soak.

No, no USB hubs or daisy chains. The three USB devices are plugged
into the two CPU sockets and the (powered) Cinema display. The two
external drives are plugged into the CPU's FW400 sockets.

I'll start bringing the "unplugs" back on line and see what happens.

Thanks for the great advice. I'll keep in touch.

I suspect my problem has a great deal to do with iTunes, and very
little to do with the hardware attached to my Mac. I continued to
do fine today until I messed with iTunes' head by trying to import
a zero-length track. Let's see if I can explain.

I'm getting most of my iTunes music via conversion of our old vinyl
LPs and cassette tapes. I import a whole chunk of analog data (an LP
or a cassette side at once), launder the sounds as best I can, then
use Amadeus II to split the big file into individual tracks, which I
then import into iTunes. If I don't pay attention, as happened this
morning, one of those "splits" can be spurious (of zero length). I
didn't notice until I had dragged the folder with all the splits
onto a new iTunes playlist.

I deleted the spurious track from the iTunes library, but the damage
had apparently already been done. The same-old-same-old started again.

Hmmm. After my testing of yesterday (without the LaCie connected) I
had a smallish "iTunes Music" folder on my startup HD. I redirected
iTunes to the LaCie's library and "consolidated" the small library
with the big library this morning, and all was well. Until I fed
iTunes the zero-length track. Could the act of re-directing iTunes
to another library correct the problem?

I powered off the LaCie again. This forced iTunes to create a new
library in ~/Music/iTunes/. I imported an MP3 just so iTunes would
have something to chew on. Then I powered up the LaCie, and pointed
iTunes to the LaCie's library again.

So far, so good.

If I'm right, iTunes is far from robust as a data base manager. One
little (zero-length) muckup, and the OSX Finder is toast? A naughty
way for an app to behave, yes?

I may have taken iTunes' name in vain. I continue to get
the freezes even without shoving a zero-length track into
the poor thing. But I'm seeing another symptom.

One very early morning the system was frozen. Again. And the
power button on the LaCie was flickering for all it was worth,
indicating a lot of disk activity. Activity Monitor said a
process called "clamscan" was hogging everything. I had
looked at ClamXav a long time back and thought I'd flushed it.
I had to force-quit the process. I downloaded the ClamXav
installer, and there was "REMOVE_engine.command," which I
promptly invoked. I guess Leslye is right. I don't have the
gene to pick up after myself.

Later another freeze with flashing light on the LaCie. Activity
Monitor again to the rescue. Now it was Netscape eating 100% of
CPU. Again required force quit from within AM.

Later same thing. AM showed a LOT of read-writes to the LaCie.
But this time no apparent culprit. I got out of it by switching
to my alternate admin acct. The LaCie didn't show as mounted, so
I turned it off. Turned it back on. No flashes. Back to me. No
flashes.

Activity Monitor was semi-helpful. No idea why an otherwise normal
app like NetScape would hog the CPU. No idea what was doing it in
the third case.

Is there a more robust diagnostic app?

I would first suspect bad hard drive. When a drive times out on a request, it will SBBOD whatever tries to access the filesystem. This can be a temporary thing that lasts usually around 5-15 minutes and then suddenly recovers, or it can be permanent forcing a reboot. Force quitting does NOT fix the problem nor does it usually actually succeed in quitting the app, since its i/o is blocking the quit.

When this is happening, oftentimes warmstarting the computer results in a hang during startup. Reason is the drive did not get reset and is still hung, and you boot up and the FS hangs waiting for the drive. Shutting off or power cycling the drive usually allows you to then boot back up, only to hang something 20 minutes or so later again as the drive again times out the system.

If the hard drive is an external like in a FW case, I suggest you tear it apart and remove the drive, and attach it to a tiger machine's IDE bus and boot up. Go into disk utility and see if SMART is failing. (it will be RED in the list) If it is not red, it may have just now ENABLED smart tracking. (smart is off by default in most drives!) So put it back in the enclousure and use it a bit. If you encounter several more freezes, take it back out and check it again, see if SMART is now failing, now that it is keeping track of itself. Unfortunately it can take several days of misbehaving for a clean reset smart to progress to failing because it has to pass a certain threshhold of problem occurrances before it toggles to failing.

Not sure what your level is but here's another thing I try. I ditto the drive to another drive. In doing so it tries to read every block on the drive. Do this 2 or 3 times and if the drive is sick you will know it because it will print IO errors in terminal. If you see any io errors, cancel the ditto and trashcan the drive.

Disk Warrior also will say "speed inhibited by disk malfunction" if it gets read errors during its scan. If you see that, time to replace the drive. These are the best two ways to check a drive if smart is not easy to test or is not available. (older drives don't support smart at all)

Thanks, Professor. I'd suspect the drive, too if using its twin didn't give
me the same problem. I have two LaCie d2 120gb drives from olden
times (January) when one was adequate to back up the home network.

Nonetheless, to your suggestion. My "level" is generally "just above
the ice," and Terminal isn't my most comfy environment. I tried ditto,
and eventually got it to exhibit behavior. It merrily copied 18gb until
it ran out of room on the destination volume. I must have mis-typed
something, because the copy wound up in my home directory instead
of on the twin. Would omitting the first slash in "/Volumes/Untitled"
do that? In any event, it was copying files instead of doing a block
copy of the original. It is obvious I'm no good at this.

Persevering, I tried CopyCatX, which claims to do sector copies. The
demo version said the identical destination volume is too small to
hold the source. Enough of that.

Tried Superduper. Seemed slower coming than Christmas. It was
doing files, too. Stopped execution and reformatted Untitled."

Retrospect's "duplicate" function hummed away merrily at a
gig a minute and reported no errors. But that, too, was a file
copy.

Just as a giggle, I re-applied the 10.3.9 combo updater. No help
there, either.

Disk Warrior, run from eDrive, gives no "speed inhibited"
erro, althought there is the ocasional b-tree repair.

As I understand it, Smart only works with internal HDs. My
understanding is often faulty.

I was just reading that iDVD does not play well with firewire
drives. Something about streaming versus direct transfer. I
wonder if something like that is happening with iTunes. If
so, maybe I should put another internal into the G4 (MDD).

Anyway, thanks very much for your input. This thing is
driving me nuts, and every idea is welcome.

In reply to:

---

As I understand it, Smart only works with internal HDs. My
understanding is often faulty.

---

Your understanding is correct. Granite Digital makes enclosures that allow SMART but I don't know of any other manufacturers that allow this. Unfortunately, I can't help you with your problem.

Granite Digital has unfortunately stopped making the bare boards with LCD display. They still offer the assembled enclosures with the display though, so that might be what you look at getting.

SMART is only available to machines where the drive is physically attached to the computer either on the ATA or the SATA bus. (SMART is apparently a query on the ATA bus?) USB and Firewire attachment points (on the serial bus) cannot query SMART status, and I don't know of any way around that.

No all hard drives support SMART, but almost all new drives do. They almost always ship from the factory with smart disabled, so the first thing you want to do when you get a drive is to check its SMART. Most SMART tools will automatically enable SMART when you first try to check it. From that point forward the drive will keep track of any errors or intermittent failures, and will change its status from Verified to Failing if any attribute goes beyond a certain number of failures. There is usually no way to reset the counters, so once a drive is Failing there is no going back.

Ditto and Rsync both use very peticular syntax for their copying There is a big difference between say, /Volumes/MyDrive and /Volumes/MyDrive/ so you have to watch how you type things. When you drag a drive or a folder into terminal it will add the trailing slash always. So if you drag a source drive and then drag a target drive, it should copy the contents of the source drive INTO the target drive, creating a perfect clone. If you drag a drive as source and a folder as destination, again both end in slash so it copies everthing on the hard drive INTO the folder.

If you don't use the slash, it will treat the path as a folder usually. So if you drag a drive and delete the slash, then drag a destination drive, it will probably create a folder on the destination by the name of the source drive, and copy files into that, which it sounds like what happened to Al.

Rsync behaves somewhat similarly but you have to read the man page for the differences. I believe they say that it exibits "bug-like behavior" because how it reacts to paths is somewhat subjective and different people expect different behaviors.

You can also ditto to /dev/null if you like. That won't go anywhere and won't fill up a drive, it will just beam your data into space. You'll still get the warnings for I/O errors on read though. Be sure to use two L's or you will get a nasty surprise in the form of a very large file in a hidden folder on your boot drive.

Another sidenote... you CAN use ditto to copy the drive you are booted on, with some caveats: (1) you MUST use the -X flag, or it will descend into /dev and try to copy those, AND it will descend into /Volumes and it WILL copy them. Your destination hard drive is in there, so you will get a copy, and a copy of a copy, and a copy of a copy of a copy until something runs out of disk space. Second is that it will copy some "virtual" items like automount and networks. You might want to get rid of those on the destination after you ditto. Note that some of these virtual items are required under intel, they are apparently not created while booted, and will hang an intel on boot if they are missing, so watch for switch hitters like that.

In any event, with ditto, don't forget the -rsrc flag unless you don't care about resource forks, and be prepared for some things on the destination drive to become visible again until you use sethidden on them. (usually not a big deal) Those attribs are not copied by ditto.

Just to put a coda on this thread, I've spent the past few
weeks basically proving the PSYCH 101 adage: random reinforcement
leads to ritual behavior. About the only thing I haven't tried
is burying chicken entrails under the northeast eave at midnight.
That one seems a tad silly. Besides, where would a city boy get
chicken entrails?

There is nothing wrong with the LaCie d2 firewire drive, or its
twin on which I also put the iTunes library. Certainly nothing
that extensive testing with TechTool Pro and Disk Warrior turned
up. After a freeze, it or my startup drive may or may not have
had directory damage. The problem may or may not have anything to
do with iTunes or some rumored interaction between iApps and
firewire drives. It definitely doesn't have squat to do with
running anything else while iTunes is up.

I've had luck the past couple days keeping the LaCie unmounted
until I need something on it. But I wouldn't count on that being
a cure.

By hook, crook, or dumb luck, I got the iTunes library fairly
complete by the time Leslye got her new G5 iPod/80 Monday. I
did nothing with it until the new USB-2 PCI cards (The G5's are
truly content only with a USB-2 connection, and our old G4 Macs
didn't know about those critters) arrived on Tuesday. All 4,400
tracks in the iTunes library made it to Leslye's iPod without
any system/app freezes, for which I am grateful. Maybe sacrificing
the virgin Tuesday afternoon helped.

I'm reasonably certain that my troubles had to do with the iTunes
library being on the external LaCie. My next "ritual behavior" will
be buying an additional internal HD for my MDD G4. After this month's
masterplastic activity is paid off. And off-loading the LaCie to it.
And putting the LaCie back into the closet.

Wish me luck.