Random freezes (Mavericks)

Such a huge disappointment. Let me just rewind a little:

When I built my hackintosh back in June I was experiencing constant freezes on my Mountain Lion. I tried everything, nothing worked. I got fed up and stayed on Windows ever since. However, I noticed that in Windows, too, I was experienced weird freezes, but the system recovered after 5-10 seconds! It happened only once in a while, and every time it did happen I saw the red HDD LED light on my case wasn't even flashing, it was just red all the time, the drive was obviously under a lot of stress. So I figured it must be a faulty hard drive.
Yesterday I bought myself a 120GB SSD and thought I might give my Mac another shot. I installed a fresh copy of Mavericks onto it. Everything worked absolutely flawlessly, no problem whatsoever. I even left the computer on during the night (to test if it will freeze) and when I woke up the system had stayed intact. I was really glad! However, about 6 hours later (30 minutes ago) I was playing a bit of WoW (first time since I reinstalled) and the computer FROZE about an hour in. I couldn't really believe it. And even weirder, upon rebooting my sound did not work anymore! And even WEIRDER, it froze again after just 5 minutes!


Some notes:
-Theres nothing special I could find in the log files.
-The old HDD was still connected to the system.
-The game I was playing at the moment of freeze was running from the old HDD***
-I now unplugged the old HDD and will continue to observe what happens.
-I haven't reinstalled my sound kext to see what will happen. Will do that now and make an edit.

EDIT:
-reinstalled VoodooHDA v2.7.2 for VT2021 and the sound is working again.

I thought to myself that if the HDD really is bad, that it should not cause any problems when the system is running from a different drive.

Any ideas? Anything?? Please!

Has been stable for 22 hours now, however, the system has not been stressed a lot. I feel like this is not the end of this.

As expected, froze again after exactly 24 hours of uptime, just 5 minutes after I started playing a game. I can eliminate out the HDD. I'm suspecting there's a problem with either the audio driver or GFX, however, I haven't seen anyone having problems with gtx 660 yet, and I'm not sure I even know any other audio drivers for my motherboard (z77x-d3h)...

Please, does anyone know how can I continue troubleshooting this?

EDIT:

Updated my BIOS to 18i and ran the game again (just for testing) while browsing the internet as usual and something happened that I have not experienced before; I was watching a video on youtube and the sound froze (looped), my mouse too, but the video not, and most surprisingly: it unfroze after about 3-5 seconds.

I'm thinking that maybe because of the updated BIOS something has changed and my system now only semi-freezes rather than completely. If this is the case I'm even more sure it's a problem with the onboard sound/driver. Especially seeing only the sound froze.

EDIT2: Nevermind that. Completely froze again. Now tried disabling onboard audio in bios. Will see what happens.

Does this help?:
http://www.tonymacx86.com/audio/70773-success-ga-z77x-d3h-audio-support.html

Bob_the_Tomato said:

Does this help?:
http://www.tonymacx86.com/audio/70773-success-ga-z77x-d3h-audio-support.html

Click to expand...

The audio isn't the problem, it works perfectly with Multibeast. I'm experiencing system hangs and trying to isolate the thing that is causing the problem. So far I've:

-updated bios
-tried disabling onboard audio
-tried removing WLAN PCI adapter that isn't compatible with MAC OS anyway.
-tried lowering RAM speed from 1600Mhz to 1333Mhz
-tried removing the graphic card and run the system without it, however, unsuccessful because I don't have a DVI-D cable and it won't boot with the VGA one.
-tested my RAM (no problem)

I believe have isolated the problem down to 3 things:
- graphic card (however, no one seems to be having problems or freezes with EVGA 660 GTX so I heavily doubt that's the problem)
- faulty motherboard?
- Network driver ‹------ I am 80% sure the Atheros kext is to blame as I've seen people on here experiencing system hangs with it (however, with other motherboards), but I simply cannot find a replacement for it. I've tried bunch of other kexts but nothing will work.

I'm running a z77x-d3h so if anyone knows for an alternative for the Atheros - Shailua's ALXEthernet kext PLEASE let me know. I really think that's the case, but I'm wondering why I'm one of the few people who seem to be having the freezing problem, or even better, why am I the only one not being able to fix this despite all the effort I make. Last week I bought an SSD for a hundred bucks because I was almost positive the HDD was to blame. Now I've spent all week trying to figure this **** out and with no luck. Not to mention the whole month I spent on the exact problem back in July-August before I decided to give up on my hackintosh, and I'm again about to just now. Sad really, I spent so much time carefully planning my build and spending quite a small fortune (for me) on it and I ended with a system that I don't really know when is it gonna stop working, when all I ever wanted was a stable system on which I could work safely without having to fear for loss of data/work. I'm so disappointed right now. Nothing ever seems to ****ing work for me. It's a shame. Shame. I have a system on which everything works without the slightest problem and with a boot time of like 3 seconds after Chimera and I end up having an issue I can't even diagnose properly.

Update: Tried removing my ASUS DVD drive (seeing it is basically the only component that's not listed in any of the successful builds and official buying guides) and disabling legacy usb support (starting to get desperate here). Has been stable for a good amount of time now, quite possibly just a fluke. Will report back.

This post has a great deal of detail on the DS3H model of your board. Does it help?
http://www.tonymacx86.com/user-buil...ev-1-0-f9-i5-2500k-hd6850-16gb-ml-10-9-a.html

Bob_the_Tomato said:

This post has a great deal of detail on the DS3H model of your board. Does it help?
http://www.tonymacx86.com/user-buil...ev-1-0-f9-i5-2500k-hd6850-16gb-ml-10-9-a.html

Click to expand...

Thank you for the effort, it's really hard to get a response on here as I see, so thank you, but you confused my board with the DS3H. I'm running on D3H. Don't worry though, I installed everything the way I'm supposed to for my board, the problem seems to lie somewhere else. I've also read about every thread on the problem on this forum, but the cause of my problem seems to be unique to the rest and also immune to any solutions on here.



So... I don't want to jinx anything, but after removing the mentioned DVD drive my system seems to to have reached the 24hour mark of stability. I've also been running Prime95 and a game (the game that made my computer freeze numerous times before) all this time to stress the system as much as I can. I hope that really did the trick, because if not, I'm about 1 system crash away from throwing the thing out of the goddamn window.

I'll mark it as stable if it runs for 2 more days without a crash. I'll report back to confirm.

EDIT:
Quite ironic, system froze again about 2 minutes after I posted this (always around 24 hours after the boot - hah, and if that wasn't enough, I even got a kernel panic (something to do with voodooHDA again) on top of it which somehow resolved by itself with a reboot.

Well that's it for me and hackintoshes. Thank you to everyone who's helped me through the last 6 months. Been a pleasure.

Sorry you're going through all this. I had a similar issue that was RAM based:

How many sticks of RAM are you using? There are many reported issues of 4 DIMMS with the 77X and 87X that cause lockups. It can be resolved in a few ways:

1. Remove 2 of the sticks
2. Hope that you have a Beta of the BIOS that resolved this issue.

I did #1 until #2 came along. Hope this helps, or at least makes you feel a bit better...

dalilama said:

Sorry you're going through all this. I had a similar issue that was RAM based:

How many sticks of RAM are you using? There are many reported issues of 4 DIMMS with the 77X and 87X that cause lockups. It can be resolved in a few ways:

1. Remove 2 of the sticks
2. Hope that you have a Beta of the BIOS that resolved this issue.

I did #1 until #2 came along. Hope this helps, or at least makes you feel a bit better...

Click to expand...

I have only 2 sticks. And I've gone through about 3 different BIOSes: the stock one, F16, and a beta F18i.
Thanks, but whatever is causing this seems to be beyond anyone, and I'm really tired from all this. I've been nerding around trying to figure this out to the extent that my friends already started worrying, obviously without success, and needless to say it really seems to be a huge ****ing waste of my time. Well, thank you for the sympathy.