From: John Ward (j_ward@uclink4.berkeley.edu)
Date: Fri Dec 13 2002 - 14:13:35 PST
Hi Magnetters,
I'm trying to troubleshoot a Powerbook G4 issue and I would love get input
from the Magnet list.
The machine is running OS 10.2.2.
Here's the sequence of events:
1. A user brought her month old powerbook to me because it "suddenly became
really slow."
2. When I booted the machine, I heard an audible clicking sound which
appeared to be coming from the hard drive. It sounded as though the
machine was trying very hard read the hard disk and that it was not
entirely succeeding. I assumed that the problem might be a failing hard
drive. The machine produced no errors indicating a hardware failure.
3. To my surprise, the machine eventually completed the boot process,
though this took about 45 minutes.
4. Upon booting, the powerbook "appeared" work, though it did everything
very slowly, especially tasks that required hard disk access. Running
applications resulted in long waits and lots of the "spinning beachball".
5. Then, something perplexing happened. Upon subsequent reboots, the
machine booted more quietly and also more quickly. Eventually, the
clicking went away and it only took 20 minutes to boot instead of 45
minutes. Though this clearly an improvement, applications still run too
slowly for this machine to be usable.
6. I booted once while holding down the cmd and v keys to view the console
messages during startup. I also viewed the system's /var/log/system.log
file. There were no messages indicating a problem.
Is anyone familiar with this problem? Any thoughts or advice would be
greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
John Ward
Computer Resources/Support
Institute of Human Development
1127 Tolman Hall #1690
University of California, Berkeley
Phone: (510) 643-1230
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The following was automatically added to this message by the list server:
For information about MAGNet, its meetings and events, and its
mailing list, including information on subscribing and unsubscribing,
see the MAGNet Web site at <http://magnet.berkeley.edu/>.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Dec 13 2002 - 14:13:22 PST