strange system freeze

[deesto]

I was trying to switch between applications on my MacBook with Apple+Tab in OS X 10.4.10, and suddenly, while I saw the list of icons on my screen for each open application, the system locked up. Strangely, the mouse still moved on the screen, even though I couldn't click on anything. But nothing I did with the keyboard had any effect. I had to shut off my MacBook and restart it.

What is the "right" thing to do in terms of the best way to recover from this sort of thing? Is there a log that can tell me what happened?

[Giaguara]

Console should show what was happening. It's in Applications/Utilities folder, and it should contain information about what happened when it crashed.

As long as your filesystem is HFS+ (the default in 10.4) it should autoheal itself at startup. You could also do a startup in safe boot (holding shift down until login screen) to have the system verified properly, or alternatively see if Disk Utility (same Utilities folder) would find anything to repair.

If in doubt of what Console says, post some lines what you see before the last shutdown.

[deesto]

Here is first line in system.log:
Oct 4 10:37:16 jd-mac cp: error processing extended attributes: Operation not permitted

Everything afterward came form the reboot after the crash; same for console.log. system.log.0.gz has some information from today but didn't seem to contain anything from the time of the crash either.

I was wondering if some application caused the crash, but there aren't any recent application crash logs. This same thing happened only once before, a few months ago.

[deesto]

This just happened again, and it doesn't look like anything from the crash was entered into the system or console log.

[Giaguara]

Hm. Copying something gave the error... what were you doing? Were you copying manually something or which programs were running? Just switching the applications?
That 'cp' could be from any application ..

[deesto]

Just switching applications, that's all. In fact, I was still switching and hadn't selected an app to switch to in either case. I had a bunch of apps running, and I happened to notice this time that a new email appeared in Thunderbird just before the freeze, but that's all I know.

[Giaguara]

Could be some particular application combination, somehting in your user account or something with the OS.
Have you tried quick tricks like repaired permissions?
Does this occur in another user?

[deesto]

Haven't tried any quick tricks... what is the repaired permissions trick? Might it help?

I only have one user account on this machine.