What do you do when your SL mac crashes? (Spinning wheel)

[cmagic]

Oh ok... I was referring more to the OP's topic of spinning beachball 'crashes', as
many of these can be cleared with a force-quit.

Force quit would not work either. Everything gets totally unresponsive, only the spinning beach-ball is giving a faint sign of life.

Btw, did I mention that these crashes mainly happened while using the finder? In that case the 'relaunch finder' option don't work either.

Thanks,

C.

 

[cmagic]

Hi Folks,

An update to my frequent crash problem.
The frequency of the crash has become so bad that my machine was nearly unusable (4 crashes and KP in the course of 2 days).
Although I am using a Gigabyte board, my problem seems to be very similar to sammcj problem (ASUS board). Just like him, when I disconnect my NTFS drives (I have 2 connected) things seems to be much more stable.
The problem is: to be fully operational with my job I need an NTFS drive plus I need almost constantly vmware fusion opened (running a windows only corporate software).

The interesting thing was that in all of the crash I had Fusion opened and NTFS on and I was constantly moving data back and forth between mac & windows with the finder.

My logs would show things like this:
Log messages:
3/26/10 8:17:13 AM kernel disk1s5: privilege violation.
3/26/10 8:17:13 AM kernel NTFS-fs error (device /dev/disk1s5, pid 438): ntfs_mft_record_sync(): Failed to write mft record 0x4107 (error 13).
3/26/10 8:17:13 AM kernel NTFS-fs error (device /dev/disk1s5, pid 438): ntfs_inode_sync(): Failed to sync mft_no 0x4107 (error 13). Run chkdsk.
3/26/10 8:17:13 AM kernel NTFS-fs error (device /dev/disk1s5, pid 438): ntfs_vnop_inactive(): Failed to sync mft_no 0x4107, type 0x80, name_len 0x0 (error 13).

So I think it is related with those NTFS drives, but I want to understand what's going one so I'm playing with different scenarios. I am still investigating the issue but here's what I did so far:

• Mac with NTFS drives on and Fusion on, Normal work: FREQUENT CRASH and hangs, ntfs errors in logs
  Mac without NTFS drives and fusion on, normal work: Much More stable, occasional crash with fusion but easy to handle, no ntfs errors
  Mac with NTFS drives and Fusion on but only using Fusion (full screen) and not the finder, very stable, no ntfs errrors

Now this last scenario is really interesting. Basically I'm using a mac just like a PC. I launch fusion full screen and forget about the mac. never use the finder and access my ntfs drives through shared folders. The results is that the machine seems to be very stable (occasional crash of windows app but ctrl+alt+del does the trick) and I can't see any ntfs errors in the log. That's an ironic situation when OSX is more stable when using a virtualized WINXP that when using OSX natively!

To me this shows that there is a problem with the NTFS drivers of the Mac and most particularly with the way the finder handle NTFS transfers. I'm still investigating and will let you know. maybe 10.6.3 will help?

cheers,

Chris

 

[adamsmasher]

I didn't know you were using NTFS drives with OS X; no wonder you were having so many crashes! Support for NTFS in Mac OS X is pretty much crap right now - you should use a 3rd party solution. I think Paragon(?) makes a 64-bit solution, although there are a couple others that may have made 64 bit editions as well.

 

[cmagic]

Adam,

Yeah, I also read that NTFS support with SL was pretty unstable. But I thought that was only true when trying to enable NTFS write access using OSX drivers (U know this is possible?).
In my case and since I only needed read access to my NTFS drives, I thought it would be ok.
But in actual fact heavy access to NTFS drives (even read only) does not seem to be very reliable with OSX SL.

Note also that I have a laptop with Leopard installed (10.5.6) accessing a Read/only NTFS partition without any glitch in more than a year!

The SL+NTFS combination seems to be the cause of my problems.

Thanks, have a nice Sunday (rainy over here in Paris, good weather for hacking!)

Chris

 

[intrus22]

if you're running snow leopard in 32bit then "Paragon ntfs for mac" should work fine. Its working for me with no crashes yet.

 

[kobu]

I'm getting random crashes of Finder as well, usually when accessing files in my NTFS partitions. It is really frustrating since all the rest is working flawlessly. I will try the Paragon driver as you suggested, we'll see if the problem disappears.

Thanks all for your help.

 

[tonymacx86]

The Spinning Beach Ball of Death! This thread made me add it as a smiley.

 

[Burninator]

I wonder if there is a way to kill the graphical system like you can with *nix (Ctrl+alt+backspace).

sudo killall loginwindow (will kill all processes and drop you back to login)

 

[kobu]

I'm getting random crashes of Finder as well, usually when accessing files in my NTFS partitions. It is really frustrating since all the rest is working flawlessly. I will try the Paragon driver as you suggested, we'll see if the problem disappears.

Thanks all for your help.

I quote myself to say that random crashes have totally disappear after installing Paragon driver Awesome, I have a full operative installation now!! and more than 1000€ on my pocket thanks to Tony and this great Forum!

 

[Guv]