Well I have been playing around some more, and it seems that the XHCI and EHCI handoff settings in BIOS may have something to do with it right now. So the two configurations that I have tried are XHCI and EHCI Enabled in BIOS without GenericUSBXHCI, which has frozen once on me. And the other is with both settings disabled in BIOS, with the GenericUSBXHCI.kext from Mountain Lion (1.2.6). The latter setup has had no issues, but I had to wait 2 days for a freeze on the first one, so we shall see. But 1 freeze a day I can live with, until hopefully something is released on Beta Seed at WWDC
devdev001,
How is your system now? Has the USB issue fixed your random freezing problem?
I just read through this thread, since I have been having random locks since I built my system in Jan (non-kernel panic lock-ups where the screen just freezes or it wakes up from sleep but freezes before the screen turns on again). The sleep freezes were almost always when I left a flash drive plugged into the front USB 3.0 ports. Occasionally it would wake up enough for me to see the "drive not ejected properly" message, which lead me to believe there was some issue with the front USB ports turning off when the system goes to sleep. Funny thing is, I have the receiver for my wireless keyboard and mouse plugged into a front USB 3.0 port, which is what I use to take the system up. Ejecting flash drives from the front ports seems to have (mostly) cleared up the freeze-while-waking issue, though not entirely. Though, I have not had a chance to thoroughly check moving the USB receiver to the rear ports.
Things seemed mostly better until I updated to 10.9.2. I started getting lots of random screen freezes again. I tried leaving my USB time machine drive unplugged from the rear ports, but that did not help. Then, on a whim, I decided to repair permissions, and there turned out to be about a gazillion permissions that needed to be fixed. I've never had so many permissions that needed to be fixed before in my life, and I've been using OSX since it was introduced. So I repaired them all, restarted, and got a kernel panic half way through start-up. First one I've had on this system. So I force-restarted, and got a kernel panic at the same point in the startup again. Of course, this happened immediately before leaving for vacation, so I have not touched it since then. I just got back, and have been researching the random screen locks before I tackle this. I have not had a chance to look into the massive amount of messed up permissions. I dont know if that's from all of the forced restarts, or software I installed, or some other issue. I really dont know anything about them, and dont know what causes them to get messed up.
My system is:
Silverstone TJ08B-E mATX case
Gigabyte GA-Z87MX-D3H mobo
Crucial 8GB x2 1600 ram
Core i7 4770k
Boot drive: 200GB 2.5" hard drive that used to be in a laptop
Second drive: 3TB 3.5" hard drive for storing iPhoto library and various DVD & Bluray rips.
Using onboard HDMI video
No SSD drives, everything stock, nothing overclocked. I think I'm using the XMP memory profile. I just used all of the recommended mobo settings from the install guide. I think the only thing I think I changed was allocating more memory to the onboard graphics.
Any suggestions will be very welcome. Been using Macs since 1990, but this is my first computer I've built, ever. Guess the first thing I'm going to try and do is boot off the flash drive, repair the boot hard drive and get it up and running from their first, and then try and fix random freeze issue. Anyone know off hand if this random freeze issue is limited to Gigabyte boards, or do the ASUS etc boards have this problem as well. Just debating whether I should bail on the Gigabyte board and get the more expensive ASUS Gryphon.
Thanks all!
Doh.
