SillyDog701

[Mamiya]

The subject says it all as to problems. Running:Mac Pro quad Xeon. 9GB's Ram, just "rembered" and working fine. Passed all tests. Model Name: Mac Pro
Model Identifier: MacPro1,1
Processor Name: Dual-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed: 2.66 GHz
Number Of Processors: 2
Total Number Of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per processor): 4 MB
Memory: 9 GB
Bus Speed: 1.33 GHz
Boot ROM Version: MP11.005D.B00
SMC Version: 1.7f10

So I am a professional working photographer and my optical drive does not open, the keyboard command comes up on the screen and fades properly, I ran Rember and the RAM passed with flying colors and I have the sbbod coming up for over thirty seconds all the time. Doesn't seem to matter what I am doing; apps, FireFox, Thunderbird, my Forum on the net.

I have done all but am not sure when to release the keyboard when I am trying to get into fsck -y. I think I may be releasing it to early as the screen keeps scrolling with type in Unix. I figure this is why I am still at this point. When I right click the mouse and start the OS the drive will open. Not with the keyboard though. It seems this is a mystery. At least to me. Can you help? I am off tomorrow and will be available to go completely through this if someone is available. If not, we can do it a little at a time.

My Leopard CD will not go all the way through, or I have been impatient and stopped it when I thought it was going on and on during attempts to archive and install to correct this web of strings. Give me a shout and tell me what you think. I would appreciate any help.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.8) Gecko/2009032608 Firefox/3.0.8

[Antony]

Have you tried resetting the PRAM of your Mac?

Steps of resetting the PRAM:

1. Shut down the computer.
2. Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command, Option, P, and R.
3. Turn on the computer.
4. Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys simultaneously before the grey screen appears.
5. Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time.
6. Release the keys.

My Leopard CD will not go all the way through, or I have been impatient and stopped it when I thought it was going on and on during attempts to archive and install to correct this web of strings. Give me a shout and tell me what you think. I would appreciate any help.

Applying archiving while re-installing Mac OS X may take a while.

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[Mamiya]

That I have not tried. I will do so and get back to you with the result. Thank you.

9:00 AM - So far it seems to be working like its old self. I am not used to it working so well. No sbbod. Monitor is sharp again.

I did not know what to expect from the computer itself when held down the keys. Gray screen goes black to power save, chime. Back to gray, back to black second chime and I let up the keys.
A long time through the gray Apple screen and about 8 minutes in the blue screen while I sweat it out. Almost gave up as I thought I must have done something wrong. Next time I will know how this works.

My optical drive door still will not open so I guess we'll have to figure that out. It will only open and the tray come out on start up with the mouse key held down.

I assume PRAM is not part of regular maintenance? I wouldn't think so at least. Just what needs to be done, if this is the problem, for sbbod and related junk occurring.

Thank you so much. Very much appreciated.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.8) Gecko/2009032608 Firefox/3.0.8

[Mamiya]

Actually, I did get the sbbod afterward in Thunderbird. I trashed the .plists for Thunderbird and FireFox and restarted and all seems OK now. So, I just have the optical drive that won't open from the keyboard and a long, long blue screen on start up.

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[Antony]

BTW, what is "sbbod"?

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.8) Gecko/2009032608 Firefox/3.0.8

[Mamiya]

As far as I understand with my limited knowledge; Spinning Beach Ball Of Death. What do I know. I will say that this has been going for some time.

Why the amount for time for start up. Say: 5 minutes by the time the blue screen goes to the desktop. I am still getting the sbbod after having bumped .plists.

I learned to pay attention for the years I had to repair the errors of my children with mac os, PC's and now what I thought was going to be a powerful Mac Pro. I knew there would be problems and so I have researched and tried my best to figure it out. My knowledge of Intel Macs is very limited. I am not afraid to get inside and give it a whirl to see if I can fix it with help from an expert. Thus, I am here to ask for help. I am not afraid to ask for help. I need help. So far, the help has been great. mamiya

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[Antony]

As far as I understand with my limited knowledge; Spinning Beach Ball Of Death.

Thanks, my brain must be shut, I did not think of that at all.

As for long starting up and long spinning beach ball, it may be due to the drivers you've loaded, certain Applications are not performing well, something running at background, or something is crashed.

You might want to reset the SMC (System Management Controller) and see if the optical drive can be opened by keyboard.

To reset the SMC:

1. Shut Down the Mac
2. Unplug all cables from the computer, including the power cord, any display cables, USB cables etc.
3. Wait at least 20 seconds.
4. Plug the power cord back in, making sure the power button is not being pressed at the time. Then reconnect all other cables to the computer.
5. Press the power button to start up the Mac.

After trashing some .plist and resetting PRAM, is the spinning beach ball still happening often?

(BTW, if you have downloaded Safari 4 Beta, I recommend you not opening it at all. It is quite a system resource hog.)

Do you connect to a lot of devices? Or load a number of applications when starting up?

If above does not help, I'd like to suggest you following:
Create a new user account (profile) for your Mac, and log onto that profile. Let me know if the spinning beach ball and eject key have been fixed by this.

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[Mamiya]

Well, to a point I love doing these types of "repairs". Intel Mac is new to me and in the long ago days when I had a Power PC I was just starting and did not know how to plug in an iron. '94 or so. Now, to tonight.

Before I came back here I had turned the Mac off. Usual prolonged yawn for start up, a blank grey screen giving way to the apple screen with the whirly gig, longer than it used to be and then a long, long blue screen. When the desk top came up the dock and the files on the desktop were not showing. I clicked the mouse a number of times at the bottom of the screen and the dock resumed, or, I should say, appeared where it belonged.

The computer is becoming very inconsistent in its start up and it now starts, at start up, with a pure grey screen. This is since the PRAM suggestion, described before here, when I thought I had gotten it back to near normal this morning and posted here. I am learning the Mac and not troubled by the behaviour. Just need to what is going on and how to fix it. I have tomorrow and Sunday and then I have a ton of post processing of 837 photos. I can always reload Photo Shop with the right click and restart. I managed to download Nikon Capture NX and update it. When email and Firefox are working they are very fast loading. Since the PRAM fix. Hope I didn't misspell anything and hope you can understand what I am asking. Thank you for being here on the net. I am an admin on my own very small forum and having fun. Just got it up and running with SMF. Take care and I will try what you ask if you don't tell me not to, having read this ramble, in the Saturday afternoon of California.

Last thing. since the "zap pram" it is amazingly fast but still full of glitches. I can't tell you what the next one is going to be. I feel like it must be my birthday with all the surprises.

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[Antony]

Good to know that it is working to a certain degree.

Just thought of one basic, have you run repair permission recently?
(Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility, select your main HDD, then click Repair Disk Permissions)

When you have time, I do recommend you creating a new user and see if the new user experience the similar issues.

It is usually recommended that running Repair Permission from time to time. As well as keeping your Mac up-to-date with Software Update.

Mind telling me which forum you are running? Just curious.

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[Mamiya]

I had tried the new user before about 3 weeks after this started. Same result so I know it is something on the HDD.

I ran repair permissions and it must have repaired a thousand and still the sbbod. Things, again, were good for a while and then.....same stuff.

I have not done the SMC as yet. I will get that today.

I also ran disk utility. You know what I am gonna say. I just got back from a shoot and sat down and got on. After a long wait watching Fire Fox bounce for at least a minute in the dock I got on the browser and all is smooth. The first time I got on in the early morning I had the beah ball at every click. that is when I repaired permissions.

Would it be best to restart and hold click the mouse to open the op drive and run disk utility from the install disc? I am willing to do anything that will work or help you to help me. I have the time this weekend.

OR, should I try SMC first and get back to you.

Hey, I really appreciate your help. I know this can be caused by many things and did not expect to nail this down in a flash.

What knowledge I have is from studying the "Missing Manual" on Leo-pard. That and screwing around forever on window since 98. Thanks.

Ok, it's an hour since I posted the above and everything, but the dock, is blazing fast. when I click on an application in the dock it bounces and bounces. Once opened it works fine. this bugger keeps changing symptoms. I just wish I knew more.

One other thing. the permissions repair showed a ton of "input/output errors". Does that help?

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[Mamiya]

Just so that I am not any goofier than I am. When I do the SMC and unplug all the peripherals we are not talking about monitor and keyboard, right. we are talking printers, scanners and speakers. I have few peripherals. Two printers and a scanner and a set of speakers. those should all be unplugged when the computer is powered down?

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[Antony]

When I do the SMC and unplug all the peripherals we are not talking about monitor and keyboard, right. we are talking printers, scanners and speakers. I have few peripherals. Two printers and a scanner and a set of speakers. those should all be unplugged when the computer is powered down?

Including basic peripherals such as keyboard, mouse, and monitor, and unplugging the mains power for 20 seconds. This will reset SMC.

If resetting SMC does not help, you might need to re-install Mac OS X and all your applications. However, before you re-install Mac OS X and all applications, I'd like you to check your Activity Monitor, and show me which ones are in red (non-response) or using unnecessary amount of RAM.

The Activity Monitor is located under Applications, Utilities. Select "All Processes" under the pull down menu, you might want to sort your processors by CPU usage. It should look something like:


Just curious, which brand and model is your scanner. (I've been having some minor problems with my old Canon scanner. With the new Epson scanner, when the hardware fails, the Epson Scan did not quit properly.)

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[Mamiya]

As far as disk usage everything is between about 500MB to 990MB.

As to KB coreaudiod-1012,00 KB
diskarbitrationd-968.00KB

As to SMC. I guess the first thing I should plug in is the monitor after the power cord?You might have to walk me through this a bit more. the monitor question is confusing me slightly.

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[PaulD]

Disclaimer: I know next to zippo about Apples and their OSs.

"Same result so I know it is something on the HDD." ... "ton of input/output errors" ---

From the context I understand that the I/O errors are on the hard disk. Is it possible that the drive is going bad, but perhaps having errors only in a certain area of the disk?
The fact that it takes a long time for an application to load, but after loading into memory is OK, could be symptomatic. There is an abundance of RAM, so there is little or no paging; it is the initial disk-reading that is slow, because of extensive error recovery.

IF this is the problem then it would be advisable to save/archive to an external device all your precious files, before they become unavailable.

I apologize if this is a red herring.

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[Mamiya]

Paul, nice to meet you, I am not sure. I worked on our own PC's for years and could probably have run this down long ago. I am just getting familiar with OS X and a Mac Pro. Being a working photographer I have no new external device as this Mac is barely a year old. I will have before the next week is over. I have a few photos on here. Thanks. I will SMC it and see what that does. Now that I have been working with you folks I am starting to suspect a cable. Maybe, maybe not.

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