Jeez! My previous post was the “kiss of death”. Since that post on Saturday afternoon. I’ve had to reboot my PowerBook twice. TWICE!
The first was Sunday afternoon. I had a few Safari windows open, I was ripping CDs into iTunes, and had a few Terminals open. The machine was running crappy. Safari wasn’t responding. So I decided to start Force-Quitting Safari windows. That didn’t work. They wouldn’t even die. I tried the same with both iTunes and Terminal and they wouldn’t die either.
With my limited knowledge I had to reboot. Damn!
Then this morning, still ripping my CDs, I inserted a CD into the SuperDrive and it never showed up in iTunes or on my desktop. I tried ejecting from iTunes and using the keyboard Eject key and it wouldn’t eject. I picked up my “Missing Manual” book and it said to eject it I had to reboot and as the machine came back up I had to hold down the mouse button. That got the CD out, but I wish I knew why it didn’t “load” in the first place. And it bothers me that I had to reboot to get the “hold the mouse button down” functionality to “force” the disk out. That just doesn’t make sense. Why require the reboot? Beats me…..
FYI. I still love my PowerBook. 🙂
Also, I’d like to add that once I really know how to “get around” in Mac OS X I expect to at least save my self from rebooting in the first case I described above.
You mean kill -9 (process number) didn’t work?
That is bad and very unheard of for a BSD system. No matter how bad things get with Unix systems I always thought doing ps -aux, finding the process id and Killing it would work.
Strange in deed. Fingers crossed that doesn’t happen again.
The first thing I tried was a “kill -9”. Being new to OS X I had no idea to do a kill through the gui.
There was something weird about about either ps or kill because I used the same steps I use at work to kill a bad process. I do a “ps -ef | grep ” and then run a “kill -9 “. Every time I tried this I got a “process not found” when I issued the kill cmd. It made me crazy. I had to pick up my book and figure out how to do it through the gui.
😮
Uggggg-ly. When you figure it out, and if you don’t mind, can you post the solution; or should I say the right way as per Apple’s books?
curious now.
I write a new blog entry to the issue so you don’t have to track these comments so closely…..
It really bothered me. I love “kill -9”. I couldn’t believe it wouldn’t kill the process. The only thing I could come up with was that the process was dying and starting so quick that by the time I got the pid it was gone and restarted.
Hmm….
Well, I can say that I have had the same experience where iTunes seems to be the bane of my problems with OS X crashing (10.3.5 on a dual 533 G4.)
No matter if the only app open is iTunes, all I have to do is listen to a few songs, and it will simulate a hard crash, a lã OS 9 style, i.e., the mouse stops moving!
I am forced to reboot (small button with the ‘triangle’ or hold the power button down for 5 seconds – the former choice is the best choice, however some people don’t have the old three-choice buttons on newer machines and have to ‘cold stop’ the machine which can force the calipers down on the platter of the drives possibly damaging the drive.)
BTY, ‘kill -9’ is not an option if the Terminal app isn’t accessible because you can’t launch it or switch to it when it’s open. Keyboard input seems to be non-existent, thus Command-Alt-Esc will not bring up the Force Quit window.
My suspicions are it is some way that the system handles MP3 files, because this happens ONLY when I am playing MP3s — it happens in the Finder Preview and has happened in VLC 0.7.2.
One interesting note is that I usually just reboot, but one time, I walked away in disgust and came back about 10 minutes later only to find that I was back to normal. The MP3 would normally stop playing and the mouse would move intermittently and then all signs of life would cease, thus ‘fooling’ me that it crashed. Ten minutes later, the music would be playing normally and the mouse would move normally. I could open new apps and life was good. I thought maybe it needed to ‘work something out’ of its system and I decided, as a test, to allow it to proceed without rebooting just to see it it would happen again.
It did. And I rebooted because I thought it was something that just needed to be done. Since then, life has been pretty dull without iTunes and I have reverted to listening to my CD collection since I need my computer for other things than leisurely pursuits.
One thing I can say is this NEVER happened until I upgraded to 10.3.4. Seems that 10.3.3 was the last stable upgrade. However, I am going back to Jaguar, as it has never failed me like this. Honestly, I feel that this is what a Windows user feels like!
Other note: This happened on iTunes 4.5 and 4.6
my two cents……………………..