Hi all,
I'm sorry if I'm posting this to the wrong group. Please let me know if I am and I'll post it elsewhere. I've learned a lot from reading here and I thought someone might have some advice for me about my problem. I know a little bit about the mac but not nearly as much as the experts here.
I have an iMac G5 that I bought in October. I now have 10.3.7, though I had 10.3.6 when the problems I'm about to describe occurred. I don't have third-party RAM.
Basically, my computer has run flawlessly when I've been using it regularly. However, twice since I've bought it I've had to go out of town, for a long weekend (the first time) and for a week (the second time). Before leaving, each time, I shut the computer down and unplugged it. Each time, after returning, my computer crashed about ten minutes after restarting it. Both times, after starting up fine, I got the spinning beach ball and I couldn't make it go away.
Both times, I tried to run disk utility from the Panther disks immediately (or just about immediately) after the crash. The error messages were slightly different. The first time I was told that I had an "Catalog file keys out of order" that required "rebuilding catalog B-Tree" (or something close to that). The applecare rep. doubted that DiskWarrior would fix this, and I don't have it yet anyway, so I just did a fresh install of the OS, which wouldn't let me do an archive and install.
The second time, the disk repair error message said "Catalog file entry not found for extent. Could not be repaired." This time, it wouldn't let me reinstall the OS until I first went to disk utility to erase the drive. The Applecare rep. said if the problem happens again Apple will send me a new hard drive.
The computer's running fine now, but I'm concerned and curious about the fact that both times I suffered these crashes after being out of town for a few days. Have any of you heard of anything like this, where a period of shutdown leads to issues? Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions about what the problem might be and anything I can do (or Applecare can do) to keep it from happening again?
Thanks in advance for any advice you can offer.
ezb
Evan Z wrote:
Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions about what the problem might be and anything I can do (or Applecare can do) to keep it from happening again?
It's acting like the battery is near death.