Troubleshooting someone else's Mac - urgh

440Hz

Hi all,

Been troubleshooting a bothersome iMac today and not getting very far with it. Its a current model iMac (alum+glass) running 10.5.0, put to sleep last night, it woke itself up this morning and was already on and would not respond to mouse clicks, cursor would move but not select. Graphic pen etc had same response. After multiple restarts (forced using , still no response, and finder began to only load left half of finder menu. It then began to intermittently respond, and during this a software update to 10.5.2 combo update was run to see if this would make any difference. Again, this restart had to be forced, and then... BSOD, and been that way ever since. Luckily everything is backed up, and he has the machine in target mode backing up to another machine now too.

I guess only option now is full reinstall Any other thoughts? Anyone come across anything along these lines before?

Simon201

Well you could try an archive and install just to save a bit of time getting everything back to how it was.

Hugh_C

440Hz wrote: »

Any other thoughts? Anyone come across anything along these lines before?

any dodgy (i.e. corrupt, not content) jpegs on desktop or in downloads folder? I've had trouble with these before continuously and repeatedly crashing the finder.

ZENER

What about safe mode ? Hold shift during startup.

Repair permissions from the Disk Utility on the install CD is another thing worth trying. Especially after forced restarting.

Was anything new added hardware wise ? RAM, external device driver . . .

ZEN

440Hz

Had tried safe mode yeah. Seems to be some issue caused by Time Machine, on closer inspection. No recovery was possible. Had to roll back to 10.5.0 on clean install. Grrrr