datapanik

July 10, 2010 5:19 PM

My mac has just crashed. What is my next step?

I have been having problems over the last few months with Safari frequently crashing, and I tried everything like resetting Safari, emptying the cache, etc... Today, my nephew suggested zapping the p-ram. I grew up with macs and remember doing this pre OSX, so I tried it. Somehow it has reverted my computer to the way it was approx. three years ago, right down to the desktop. Safari is now version 1.3, iTunes is version 4. I had ten thousand songs, and now only 3500. What is going on? The only thing I have tried so far is restarting several times which hasn't helped. Am I screwed?

My computer is a 733mhz power PC G4

Sorry if I am not asking this very well.

posted by puny human to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Best answer: It sounds like your hard drive is partitioned -- this makes it act like two (or more) separate hard drives, each with a separate installation of the OS and applications and documents. When you zapped the PRAM, it started booting into an old partition instead of a newer one.

Go to the system preferences, click on "Startup Disk", and see if more than one disk shows up -- if so, click it and hit the Restart button.
posted by xil at 5:30 PM on July 10, 2010 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: That was it xil. Thanks!! (I have 3 hard drives and didn't notice that it had switched startup disks)

Data restored. Puny human happy :)
posted by puny human at 5:52 PM on July 10, 2010

Did that fix the Safari problem?
posted by artdrectr at 6:10 PM on July 10, 2010

Response by poster: Nope, it just crashed again. It follows a similar pattern every time. Start safari, I browse for a couple of minutes, then it crashes. I start safari again and it hangs and won't load. Start again, same thing. Then on the third try it works.

I'm guessing I should do a clean reinstall of Safari?
posted by puny human at 6:16 PM on July 10, 2010

Safari might be crashing if you're using extensions. I installed some extensions in Safari 5 (?) and it was continually crashing until I disabled them.
posted by 47triple2 at 7:17 PM on July 10, 2010

My wife's Safari has been crashing specifically when she tries to page through someone else's photos on facebook. It's not a privacy controls problem; it works just fine when she uses her old Windows laptop. I installed Firefox for her on her mac and that works fine.

Mystery bug in Safari, I guess.
posted by ctmf at 7:37 PM on July 10, 2010

I've never experienced your problem, but fixing permissions in disk utility and running fixit stuff in diskwarrior has always taken care of all my problems.

And what ctmf says...maybe install firefox and/or google chrome, if safari is giving you so many problems...
posted by nevercalm at 8:40 PM on July 10, 2010

I experienced similar problems on a 3 year old MBP, things were just running a bit sluggish. I ended up getting a new MBP and transferred over my data using the Mac OSX tools, I then found that I was having the same problems. When I did a fresh install of OSX and just moved over my data manually, it was much snappier. Might be something worth trying. Make sure to backup thoroughly of course.
posted by dnesan at 9:14 PM on July 10, 2010