On today's menu is kernel panic or freezing CPU

[AIllusion]

If the number of times I've yanked out the CPU this week wasn't so sad it would be funny. Along with a defective HD card that was returned to Digi earlier in the week, I've experienced a myriad of weird issues related to closing sessions. So in frustration, desperation, and several other "ations," I'm turning to the Sages of the DUC in full assurance you'll know the answers. Here we go...

Problem: When closing a session, particularly after open for 30+ minutes, system will freeze - spinning ball. After 5+ minutes, either kernel panic or I have to hard restart. Force quit not an option.

Troubleshooting already attempted:
Other than sending back a defective process card (by the way, the core card and extra process card passed digitest earlier in the week), I have done the following:
[1] trashed DAE preferences umpteen times
[2] trashed waves preferences
[3] reset pram (control-option pr) every kernel panic
[4] swapped out firewire drives and cables - no problems found (fw400)
[5] verify permissions using disk utility repair
[6] ran ram test using apple hardware test 2.2.5 - all ram passed (crucial ram 2x256, 4x512)
[7] pulled and reseated cards
[8] swapped slots with process cards
[9] found defective card and returned to digidesign
[10] downloaded and installed latest PT versions - was running 6.9 when problems started, now updated to 6.9.1cs2
[11] installed new pace driver
[12] installed new eqIII plugin

Any and all wisdom on the matter will be much appreciated!

Rex

[KingFish]

Well Rex, I'd make an image of your system drive, so that you can return to where you're at, then... I'd try the 10.3.9 update... i know it's not supported, but it works well for me, and it may fix a problem that is system related, and "Showing up in Pro-tools"

failing that, with your image safely in tact, I'd zero the drive, and fresh instal OS X

Sometimes a 3rd party software, or driver, can mess with unrelated programs like PT, and finding the culprit, is near impossible.


I keep several images of "working installations" handy, on several volumes for this reason.

Good luck.. let us know how you're making out.

[Lee Blaske]

Is anything going to sleep? That might cause a problem.

Have you tested running a session with all your FW drives unplugged, just to make sure there's no problem there? There might be some drive corruption problems. Are all your FW bridge boards flashed with the latest firmware?

Have you tested all your hardware?

As the previous poster suggested, if you get desperate, completely re-initializing all your hard drives including your system drive, and re-installing all your software would be a good idea. Sure, it's time consuming, but all the time you're spending noodling around with things really adds up. Sometimes, things get goofed up in esoteric ways, and wiping the slate clean is the fastest plan of action.

Lee Blaske

[Howardk]

I had a project over a year ago where a number of different sessions keep crashing in a myriad of different ways (when i say a bunch, I mean pretty much every song in the project) somewhat unpredictably. I was pulling my hair out for days. I did all the usual things such as, del prefs, del Digi DB files, reinstalled ProTools, moved audio from FW to SCSI and then to Internal ATA drives, reseated, changed out cards, complete re-install of OS on new hard drive, etc. . . nothing helped. In the end I created new a blank session file, imported all the tracks, and did an export/import of the midi to get my many memory markers. That was it. I have no idea how so many of my session files in that project became problematic at about the same time. Now, when sessions start acting up, I create new session files a lot earlier in the trouble shooting process.

About a year ago my system was acting up terribly. The system was dual boot, with 2 different system drives, with 2 different versions of OSX, and 2 different versions of ProTools (I have my older tested version that was somewhat trusted and the newer version I was testing to see if it was ripe). At some point both just started acting up. After many hours/days of trouble shooting I removed one of the system drives and the kernal panics almost disappeared (from many times a day, to once a week). Prior to this the system had been stable with the exact same hardware configuration for many months. Go-figure!

Best of luck!

[AIllusion]

To one and all that that responded to my original post, thank you very much for taking the time to advise how to remedy the problems I mentioned. Your real-world experience is much appreciated. I'll use your excellent suggestions and report back.

If there are others out there that have comments regarding this string, jump in and give us your thoughts. I welcome any and all ideas.

Rex

[DigiTechSupt]

One thing you might try is creating a new administrator account, sign in under it and try everything again. This should give you an idea if it's a problem just with your current account or something else (like the OS). If you can work fine in the new account, it's most likely a preference file in your current account causing the problem. If it still behaves improperly, it's likely an OS issue and doing a clean install of the OS may be the way to go.

[AIllusion]

To HowardK and my fellow DUC mates,

The plot thickened a bit when I took my (EZQuest) hard drive to another studio (OMNIsound in Nashville, by the way a great place to work) and fired it up on a G4 running OS 10.3.8. Crashes continued to occur on their CPU although more frequently - arming a track to record, changing control values on the console, freezes when closing sessions, etc. The guys at the studio witnessed all this and said it was highly unusual as their system was typically stable. This led me to believe that it wasn't my hardware, or OS, or configuration. Perhaps something was corrupt in the session file itself.

I tried HowardK's suggestion when I returned home (importing to a new session) and haven't had a crash since -- thanks for the creative idea.

Hopefully, my experience will be helpful to anyone out there with similar symptoms.

Rex