Uh oh! Why did my Mac stop working?

September 8, 2009 2:05 PM

My four year old Mac PowerBook suddenly (after behaving perfectly for this long!) won't run any programs--won't even open up system preferences or terminal. Help! What should I do？

It starts up normally, though date and time are the 1969 defaults that show up when the battery's run all the way down. When I try to open a program, it hangs/beachballs, and attempting to force quit the program does nothing.

It's a PowerBook running 10.4. It hasn't been behaving out of the ordinary at all before this (I've noticed it's running a little hot, and it's slower than I'd like, though completely reasonable for a four year old laptop! Otherwise it's been behaving perfectly the whole time I've owned it).

Any suggestions on what happened? How to bring it back to life? Or at worst, how to save the past few weeks of un-backed up files? (And in case my levelheaded tone doesn't convey this: Help! Yikes! I'm too broke to afford a computer in the next 6 months, and I'll be in a really difficult situation without one! #!$#@&!)

posted by soviet sleepover to computers & internet (10 comments total)

It starts up normally, though date and time are the 1969 defaults that show up when the battery's run all the way down.

What? The date and time should not reset to 1969 defaults unless the clock battery is dead. This is a tiny thing that is very different than your main laptop battery -- otherwise the clock would reset everytime you changed the battery and we'd have a planet full of PowerBooks blinking 12:00 AM.

Try resetting the PRAM.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379
posted by rokusan at 2:09 PM on September 8

Get your data off via FireWire target disk mode: connect to another Mac and boot up while pressing the "T" key when the chime sounds. It'll mount to the other Mac like any external drive; you can just copy off your recent files.

Then, I'd say make sure your backups are good and then wipe the hard drive and reinstall the OS. It's a little drastic, but it'll definitely clear up any OS-related issues you may have. Once that's done, if the problem continues, it's either a specific program or hardware.

The other thing to do is see if you can open the Activity Monitor (in /Applications/Utilities/). Sort by memory and CPU and see what's taking up the resources when the other programs can't start. If you can't even open Activity Monitor, see above.

That said, I'd wait and see if there are other, more reasonable, suggestions below.
posted by The Michael The at 2:13 PM on September 8

You probably just need a new PRAM battery.
posted by maniactown at 2:16 PM on September 8

After you get a new battery (or at least reset the pram and notice it doesn't reset the time/date on a restart...)

Run Disk utility, fix permissions and verify disk (and let us know if that doesn't come back okay - in fact STOP if it doesn't and come back here.)

If that works, then Download Onyx-Tiger version - run it's 'automation' tab. This will repair quite a bit of the cruft. Make sure you do the 'launchservices' which I suspect needs a full rebuild (and ONYX will do.)
posted by filmgeek at 4:29 PM on September 8

What? The date and time should not reset to 1969 defaults unless the clock battery is dead. This is a tiny thing that is very different than your main laptop battery -- otherwise the clock would reset everytime you changed the battery and we'd have a planet full of PowerBooks blinking 12:00 AM.

My PowerBook G4 (typing on it now) has a dead PRAM battery and does this whenever I let the main battery run down completely dead and it's not plugged in. When I first start it up from this state (which isn't very often, really, since it's usually plugged in) it'll freak out about the date. Then it'll associate with my access point and automatically sync the time over the internet. After that, everything's back to normal.

I haven't had any problems like the OP is having, though. OP - do you have the time set to automatically sync over the internet?
posted by odinsdream at 6:27 PM on September 8

My PowerBook G4 (typing on it now) has a dead PRAM battery and does this whenever I let the main battery run down completely dead and it's not plugged in. When I first start it up from this state (which isn't very often, really, since it's usually plugged in) it'll freak out about the date. Then it'll associate with my access point and automatically sync the time over the internet. After that, everything's back to normal.

My PowerBook does this same thing, but I have to reset in manually. I've had problems with nothing working until I reset the time and restart it if my PRAM is dead. If that's a possibility for you, it's worth a shot.
posted by itsonreserve at 6:48 PM on September 8

ntpd generally doesn't sync when the skew is too large. To force a sync right away, open terminal and run:

sudo ntpdate -bu time.apple.com

That said, I'm not sure clock skew explains your hanging applications, but behavior is hard to predict in this state. Also note that when you update your clock, all your periodic UNIX scripts fire off, which can really bog the machine down for a while. In particular "locate.updatedb" will start running, which scans the entire filesystem to build a database. Expect pretty poor performance for a while.

Your second step to trouble-shooting this after resetting your PRAM (probably not necessary, it sounds like the battery is dead-dead-dead, so this will happen on its own) is to watch the system log when you try to open the applications that are giving you trouble, which is in /var/log/system.log.

On preview, you can't even open Terminal.app? I hate to say it, but your hard drive might be dying.. can you open Disk Utility at all? Check S.M.A.R.T. status and try verify disk.
posted by cj_ at 6:50 PM on September 8

Thank you everyone! I reset the PRAM like rokusan said. Everything started up normally, so I ran disk utility/fixed permissions/verified disks, etc, then downloaded Onyx and did just about everything possible. Everything seems fine. (But I backed up everything have space for, just in case.) Is there anything else I should do now/regularly?

I'm not sure if the PRAM battery is actually dead--the clock's been resetting itself when the main battery dies completely for quite a while, but it's rare enough that I haven't noticed any actual pattern to it. Sometimes (rarely) it happens; other times it doesn't.. But if the battery were in fact dead as cj_ says, wouldn't it have reset itself automatically when I restarted the computer the first time, after it started behaving badly?...
posted by soviet sleepover at 7:36 PM on September 8

It could be that it's almost dead. Probably don't run your main battery down to nothing if you can avoid it.
posted by cj_ at 2:50 AM on September 9

Find another Mac. Start up your laptop in Target Disk mode. Back up your files first. Then run Disk Utility on the computer while in Target mode. Check for errors. If you have something more heavy-duty (DiskWarrior, or TechTool, or DriveGenius...) run that instead. Repair problems, etc as needed. Do a reinstall as a last resort IF no physical problems have been detected on the drive. If the drive itself is flaky, you can drop a few bucks to buy a replacement. Much cheaper than replacing the whole computer.

If you don't have the tools to do this yourself consider bringing it in to an authorized repair center to have them do it for you. Again, likely to be cheaper than a new Mac.
posted by caution live frogs at 5:44 AM on September 9