Mysterious OSX Voodoo

[mestevie]

Hi My Name is Steve and this is my first post to this forum. I have browsed it many times before and you all have helped me with many problems, without even knowing it.

I thought I'd share a really interesting experience I am having with my Powermac right now.

The Powermac is a G4 Dual 500 Mystic running OS 10.4.9. I have installed an extra 40 gb hard drive so I have two HD's inside. One system HD which I call 'Mystic' and one data HD which I call 'Eagle'.

I am relatively new to Macs in some senses - I had alot of involvement with them in a past career - back then the mac of choice was a Quadra. Anyway recently got back into macs and now proudly own a G3 and a G4 Powermac.

So recently I upgraded to 10.4.9. I have also recently had a flurry of install activity, deciding to fully switch from PC to Mac. To do this i loaded up some apps that i thought would be standard..quicksilver, ecto, superduper and textwrangler.

SO ahving setup my Powermac G4 just the way I wanted it I thought I'd get a backup regime happening. Up until this decision i had never has a single problem with my Powermacs.

So I purchased an external firewire HDD, activated my copy of Superduper and set about doing the backup.

Thats when the first problem appeared. My Firewire external drive didnt want to mount up on the finder. A quick check on the G3 reveals that its not the ext HDD as it mounts up in firewire on that machine just fine.

Back to the G4, switched to USB, and drive shows up fine. OK Firewire issue, so I check sys profiler - Firewire ports not visible. A quick google reveals that this is a common issue. PRAM, NVRAM and Open Firmware reset procedures documented all over the web were tried still to no avail. Oh well. one to investigate but not the end of the world, just means my intended backup is going to be way slower on usb 1.1.

So I prepare for the backup again. Repair permissions on mystic. Partition the ext HD to reflect my two internal HDDs. Spark up Superduper and do a smart update from 'Mystic' to 'MysticBackup' on th ext HD partition. Now things get really interesting.


After a couple of hrs of backing up I get a locked up mac. OK what I have I done thats stoopid. Aha, I have left the sleep and screen savers on-must have something to do with it. Turn those off, start smart backup again. Backup passes last lock up point, but another hr or so after I get a please reboot your computer message.

I start to worry. Boot the mac up again. Ahhh sheez - Quicksilver loads at startup!!! Could be a problem, so I disable QS, make sure no other programs are running, repair permissions on Mystic

Run Superduper again. Runs all the way through and backup completes. OK good. I know have a bootable version of my setup. So onto the data drive, 'Eagle' which i superdupr smart backup to "Eagle Backup' on my ext HDD. BAckup runs overnight, with no glitches.

So all is cool. Except it isn't. Whilst these backups were running I went out and did some photography. So I was keen to load photos up on the mac. As Iphoto kicked in as it normally does, i noticed my pictures stopped dloading....then finder stopped responding...then freeze!!!


I restart and do a disk verify - minor errors on disk. hmmm OK, so I restart again, just to be sure (its the PC user in me).

The try and do a restart, and I get that sinking feeling when I see....kernel panic!

Never ever had a freeze before in my Mac life, but now after running a backup, the thing freezes on me and then i get a kernel panic!! Something is fishy here.

I whack in OSX install disk, open up disk utility, go to do a repair...cannot repair my drive!!!

SO this is where i am at now. I am running a restore from my 'mystic backup' on the portable HD after erasing and zeroing Mystic. Its running the restore as I type this on another PC, and going *really* slowly over usb 1.1.

Is it some coincidence that as soon as I run a backup i run into problems? Have I stuffed the OSX boot disk by foolishly leaving apps running whilst trying to do a full backup of the system? Will my restore work, or is my 'mysticbackup' infested with the same problem as my original mystic. Will I have to do a OSX clean install?

What strange voodoo is going on here? I'll keep you posted........