Ticket Options

Question Profile

Question Details

TICKET ARCHIVE -> Horizontal Bars on Screen after panic

hyperchris - Oct 9, 2007 - 2:18 pm

At the end of updates, my machine (G5 tower on 10.3.9) usually panics during system optimization. This last time it came back up with horizontal bars all over the screen. Each bar was about an inch across and a quarter inch tall and spaced a half inch apart in both directions. The bars appeared as soon as the video came on and persisted all the way into the Finder.

At first I thought my video card was history but I logged in using ARD and the bars were there too. I shutdown and restarted a few times with no change. I then shut it down for about an hour and that time it booted normal.

My only guess is that the heat from the panic baked something. Open to ideas as I doubt this is the last i will see of it. My next step was going to be booting off a CD or FW backup so as to isolate it to hardware or software.

Thanks ... Chris

Serenak - Oct 11, 2007 - 2:48 pm

Thanks for using macosx.com

I don't know that I can actually help much or even tell you what the problem is... but I can tell you that anything that causes the optimisation to fail is very bad - and your Mac most definitely should not panic during a post update optimise, that can in fact total the system or otherwise "brick" the Mac.

Normally when I do almost any update I just leave the Mac to get on with it and do absolutely nothing else - this is not required behaviour but I just figure nothing I do is going to make anything go "toes up" at a critical point

Firstly I would most definitely boot from a system disk and at the very least run the Disk Utility to repair permissions and check the disk (or you could use single user mode and run the fsck -f from there.

If you don't have a simple tool like OnyX or Cocktail download one - OnyX is completely free, Cocktail has a fully functioning demo - run all the cron maintenance scripts etc... (there are others such as YASU, Xupport or even Mac HelpMate).

Sorry if you have done all that stuff already - but I would hate to slip up by assuming something as "obvious"

Have you checked the state of your RAM? The free tool Rember can give it a workout and tell you if it thinks any is "sub optimal" - OS X is very finnicky about its RAM. Do you get panics at any other times?

I would very definitely want to try and track the root of this down because if it is not software based your Mac needs professional help. Having said that I had a G5 iMac that had the video problem that affected some of them - and it was nothing like you describe (it started with odd little patches of apparently "stuck" pixels that would start working again if you changed window and within 72 hours degraded to big rainbow bars and scrambled window frames etc. that wouldn't go away.) Apple fixed that for me under the extension programme.

I am not sure how ARD gets the screen output - so I cannot say if logging in using that rules out the video card or not. Likewise booting from a backup might not be a true test either if something in the core system is dubious - it might also be bad in the backup. Use the System Disk and the Apple Hardware Test...

Hope this helps - let me know how it goes - if nothing I have said is anything new or you have done it already still come back to me and I will reopen the question for other Techs to assist with.