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TICKET ARCHIVE -> Serious Problems With Imac G5

sgsilver - Jul 26, 2005 - 12:06 am

My friend bought a new iMac G5 (2GB RAM -- OS 10.4.2). She has been using it mostly to import and edit digital video (DV) using iMovie. She has had continuous problems with iMovie -- the application often crashed, and sometimes caused the system to freeze, requiring a Force Quit to be performed. Finally, her entire system crashed yesterday -- all she gets is an apple icon on her screen and nothing else. She called Apple Support, and they said that she probably has to reformat her hard drive.

Questions are as follows: 1) What could be causing this problem, especially on a new machine? 2) Is there another option besides reformating her hard drive? 3) If there are no other options, is there any way for her to save the data from her hard drive before reformatting?

Thank you,
Steve

philippe99 - Jul 26, 2005 - 2:17 am

Steve
Welcome on macosx.com

(1) a defective hard drive may be the culprit; iMovie is a great user read-write on dissk, so this soft has perhaps reveals a problem on your machine
(2) The G5 comes, on the DVD, with AppleHardwareTest application; boot on the DVD and run all -the basic + the extended test-; does the AHT shows something
I would also try to repair the startup disk and permissions as decribed here:
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/repairprocess.html
I would also purge the caches
(3)
a. bying a external FW drive (Firewire to be bootable, USB2 are bot bootable) and clone the internal drive to the external through the excellent shareware SuperDuper
b. use the intelligent tburning folders facility to burn on CDs/DVDs the documents. And , yes of course, after reformatting you'll have to re-install the non-apple applications you use (serial, setting, ..)

A question: do you have othe intensive drive-access application (like games,..) to see if the culprit is really the hard drive or iMovie

Regards
Philippe

sgsilver - Jul 26, 2005 - 2:52 am

Hi Phillipe, thanks so much for your quick reply. To answer your question, no, she doesn't use any gaming apps or any other such applications. She primarily uses iMovie, iDVD, and Safari.

I will try your recommendations. One other thing - I have a PowerBook G4 laptop. Would it be possible for me to connect to her machine via Firewire, boot up through my laptop, and access her hard drive from there?

Thanks,
Steve

philippe99 - Jul 26, 2005 - 3:39 am

Yes, of course

(1) In summary
To connect two Macs together via FireWire Target Disk Mode.

a. Turn both off.
b. Turn one on (the one you DON'T want to appear as a drive on the other, so your PB) and let it fully boot up.
c. Then turn on the other and hold down the T key. A little graphic should appear in the middle of the screen on the client computer indicating it is in target disk mode, and the drive of the client computer should then appear on the other computer.

(2) Apple's details
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58583

Good luck
Philippe