10.2 freezing - or is it me?

[karavite]

I was trying to ignore it, but it has happened 5 times now and nothing but my OS version has changed for a while.

10.2 has frozen up on my system requiring me to use the restart button that has seen so little action for the past year. The spinning wheel of death appears and I cannot quit or switch to anything else or even do a force quit since it seems it is the finder itself that is frozen. It seems my only option is the restart button. This has happened at different times, but it seems to occur when my system has sat there for while and has a few apps open (Mail, IE, a finder window or two and Windows Media player with some radio station playing) - I do not have energy saving or sleep options on.

In addition, I have one thing that is a little unorthodox, but it was never a problem before and I'm hoping it is not now. I boot off an external 80 GB firewire drive (I have 2 internals at 20 GB, but I wanted at least a 30 GB partition to boot from - please don't give me options for having my user files on another partition - I just want a simple life if I can have it). When the system freezes and I push the restart button the system will not boot up - I get a plain grey screen that just sits there. I need to shut down the external drive's power, start it back up, then start the computer. It seems to really take its time starting up after this, but I am assuming OS X is dealing with the fact that the machine was not properly shut down.

I can't say if I ever had to do this with 10.1.3, 4 or 5 BECAUSE THEY NEVER EVER FROZE! Any advice, opinions, similar experience? What are the odds this is a 10.2 issue and not a problem with my drive?

P.S. G4 450 with 1 GB ram.

[ElDiabloConCaca]

Did you choose the "upgrade" path to 10.2 from 10.1.5? I did, and experienced NUMEROUS kernel panics, and when I wasn't experiencing those, I was experiencing Finder freezes. Only the Finder, though, and it happened at random times. However, one thing remained the same: any time anything tried to access anything on one of my hard drives connected to my Sonnet Tempo ATA/100 PCI card, the Finder would freeze requiring a hard restart. Also, I could not copy anything to or from my system disk. Weird. I formatted, wiped, started over, and reinstalled 10.2 from scratch. This thing is ROCK solid now.

I recommend staying away from the "upgrade" option. It caused me problems twice. I'm sure numerous people have had tremendous luck with it, but I highly recommend a reformat and scratch install.

[karavite]

Well, good to hear I am not alone!

This isn't fair. I have sooooooooo many things set up the way I like them and I don't really need or want more "quality time" with all my applications, files, directories, preferences, X install, ... you name it, we are talking about hours and hours if not days of work.

Any chance a 10.2.1 upgrade or something will cure my ills? I just don't want to do this now or ever!

How about prebinding? Anything but a clean install! I thought that was all behind me...

[karavite]

7 hours later...

Okay, I did a clean install on a new partition, copied all my files, reinstalled the apps I needed to, reset preferences... everything but reinstall fink X Darwin, all my perl libraries, apache settings... maybe another 7 hours of work.

Ugh - I hope this pays off! Thanks for your suggestion - I just meakly assumed Apple would do us all right on this one and that the upgrade would work.

[ElDiabloConCaca]

Hmmm... I'm assuming our problems stem from the fact that you and I like to customize our OS X installations, and perhaps the upgrade path assumes that you're simply a normal user and don't muck around with too much UNIX stuff... when it tries to upgrade something we've changed, well, problems arise. I'm assuming my Finder freeze from disk read/writes stems from the fact that I've installed hacked versions of the Sonnet Tempo ATA/100 drivers to enable deep sleep mode and what-not... I dunno, but a fresh, clean install proved to be worth the extra work!

[karavite]

That makes sense, but I am hardly the most savvy or daring OS X user out there! I thought installing X with fink left the system alone - everything was in the /sw directory and one little line to my path? My explorations into perl and apache are really quite amatuerish - I only did enough to run a few simple scripts locally.

I guess I was spoiled by all the other OS X upgrades, but with 10.2 being a bit more dramatic, I guess I can understand this.

[Jermsmingy]

I did a clean install the day that jaguar came and it has frozen twice in the past week. I was wondering if anyone else has had the same problem. I don't want is causing it, but I hope that apple figures it out soon.

[karavite]

I did a clean install the day that jaguar came and it has frozen twice in the past week. I was wondering if anyone else has had the same problem. I don't want is causing it, but I hope that apple figures it out soon.

Oh man, where were you yesterday! This is not good. I'll let you know if my new fresh and clean install starts to crash too. When you say clean, do you mean on a completely newly formatted drive? Any particular applications or unusual circumstances to your freezes? I really didn't see a pattern in mine other than it seemed to happen when the computer was left alone for long stretches of time (a few hours).