System freezes...

[hacmac1]

Hi,
I have a very strange error that has come up, I have spent days trying to figure what's going on, maybe someone here who has more experience will know what's going on, maybe there's something simple that I overlooked but I don't what else I can check out.
My friend has a couple of older Mac minis running Snow Leopard, they originally had 5400rpm spinning drives so I put new Samsung 256GB SSDs in them instead, also put new parameter batteries in, and TRIM support. I checked things out and everything ran fine, no problems whatsoever. I shipped them to my friend but when she booted up, the system would freeze up with a spinning beach ball after a few minutes. Tried parameter resets, power resets, reboots but nothing would fix it. Ok, so she sends the minis back to me. I plug everything up and booted up. Everything works fine for me!!! Not one single failure, had 4 apps running at the same time, switching between them, restarts would work flawlessly. I just could not get the systems to fail. Ok, I send the mini back to her, now we get that same problem, it will freeze up after a couple of minutes. The only things that are connected up to the mini are a backup timemachine drive, keyboard, mouse and then hooked up an HDMI monitor with a DVI to HDMI adapter. As it stands right now, the mini works perfectly for me. I never had an error like this come up, if you have any ideas on a fix, please let me know.
Thanks,
Hacmac1

 

[UtterDisbelief]

Hi,
I have a very strange error that has come up, I have spent days trying to figure what's going on, maybe someone here who has more experience will know what's going on, maybe there's something simple that I overlooked but I don't what else I can check out.
My friend has a couple of older Mac minis running Snow Leopard, they originally had 5400rpm spinning drives so I put new Samsung 256GB SSDs in them instead, also put new parameter batteries in, and TRIM support. I checked things out and everything ran fine, no problems whatsoever. I shipped them to my friend but when she booted up, the system would freeze up with a spinning beach ball after a few minutes. Tried parameter resets, power resets, reboots but nothing would fix it. Ok, so she sends the minis back to me. I plug everything up and booted up. Everything works fine for me!!! Not one single failure, had 4 apps running at the same time, switching between them, restarts would work flawlessly. I just could not get the systems to fail. Ok, I send the mini back to her, now we get that same problem, it will freeze up after a couple of minutes. The only things that are connected up to the mini are a backup timemachine drive, keyboard, mouse and then hooked up an HDMI monitor with a DVI to HDMI adapter. As it stands right now, the mini works perfectly for me. I never had an error like this come up, if you have any ideas on a fix, please let me know.
Thanks,
Hacmac1

Hi there.

I think you will need to get more information from the person using the Mini.

For example, is the machine completely locked-up or does the mouse-pointer still move around? Is there a spinning beach-ball? Does the desktop look the same or are there any graphic artefacts?

As the machine works fine for you, then that sugests that something the end-user is plugging-in to it is causing a bottleneck and then a freeze ... Maybe? What type of Time-Machine back-up drive are they using?

 

[trs96]

What type of Time-Machine back-up drive are they using?

Possibly Spotlight indexing the TM drive is causing the issue. hacmac1 is not booting up with that plugged in.

 

[hacmac1]

Thanks for your responses.
I told her to unplug the time machine backup before she boots up, will see if that is causing the prob. I will report what kind of result she gets.
What happens is that the Mini will work for about a minute or two for her then gets a spinning beach ball, then will totally freeze up, the desktop looks fine, no artifacts, but can't use keyboard or mouse. The keyboard and mouse are ones that worked with the mini at my place which she is using now. The monitor has a standard HDMI port that she's plugged into. There's nothing other than the keyboard, mouse, DVi to hdmi adapter chord, and time machine backup, no other devices. The TM backup was hooked up to USB port.
One thing I didn't think about is I'd like to see if I can get her to switch as a different user but maybe the system will freeze up too quickly.
And then when she sent it back down to me, it boots up fine !!! Wow!

 

[hacmac1]

The time machine backup is an SSD hooked up to the USB port.

 

[UtterDisbelief]

Thanks for your responses.
I told her to unplug the time machine backup before she boots up, will see if that is causing the prob. I will report what kind of result she gets.
What happens is that the Mini will work for about a minute or two for her then gets a spinning beach ball, then will totally freeze up, the desktop looks fine, no artifacts, but can't use keyboard or mouse. The keyboard and mouse are ones that worked with the mini at my place which she is using now. The monitor has a standard HDMI port that she's plugged into. There's nothing other than the keyboard, mouse, DVi to hdmi adapter chord, and time machine backup, no other devices. The TM backup was hooked up to USB port.
One thing I didn't think about is I'd like to see if I can get her to switch as a different user but maybe the system will freeze up too quickly.
And then when she sent it back down to me, it boots up fine !!! Wow!

The spinning beach-ball usually means the system is waiting on a process. As the Time-machine drive seems to be the only difference between the two set-ups, I'd look there.

Some brands/models of SSDs have Trim issues with macOS, specifically a very long time-out before drives are read. And if, as my friend @trs96 says, macOS is trying to run Spotlight ...

As you've done a good job of discounting just about everything else, this or something similar, seems most likely at this point of our knowledge.

 

[trs96]

The spinning beach-ball usually means the system is waiting on a process.

I'd think that the older Mac mini has only a Sata 2 bus so it really can't take full advantage of the faster Samsung SSD. Add to that a slower mechanical HDD (I'm guessing) plugged in externally and it's going to produce spinning beach balls.

 

[hacmac1]

I have some new info which I wanted to share.
I really racked my brains out to figure what was different between when I had the system at my place and then when my friend was using it at her place. I forgot that I didn't have the Mini hooked up to any wifi or network, so I told my friend to disable wifi, wow, her mini started to work correctly. It wouldn't hang like it previously did and became more stable. When she enabled the wifi, again she would get a spinning beach ball and the machine locked up. So I told her to hook up ethernet and see if that would work. Nope, didn't work. But the thing is, I have another one of her minis and tested it. It worked perfectly, no problems using ethernet at the same time as using the other programs. I sent it back to her, she has it now, curious to see how that peforms.
FYI, the attached time machine backup drive didn't seem to be involved in this problem. I had no problems with doing TM backups or using the main SSD drive. It worked pretty darn fast and consistently. Maybe there's a setting somewhere in networking or a pref file that's not set correctly or is corrupt ?
Anyway, hope this new info will give clues as to what's going on.

 

[hacmac1]

another news update...
My friend tried to boot the Mini with ethernet, didn't work !! It seems like if there's no wifi or ethernet connection, it will boot. Yet, when I booted it at my place everything works fine using ethernet. I am at a loss for words......

 

[UtterDisbelief]

another news update...
My friend tried to boot the Mini with ethernet, didn't work !! It seems like if there's no wifi or ethernet connection, it will boot. Yet, when I booted it at my place everything works fine using ethernet. I am at a loss for words......

Well it's a month later now. Out of interest did you get this problem figured-out?