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Bought a Mac: What a mistake

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dmurray14

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 31, 2005
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I'm not impressed. All these mac commercials boasting about how reliable the Mac is, and I've had to reinstall OSX TWO TIMES in the first 48 hours of owning it, now it looks like I have to do it again. First time the system froze and wouldn't find the mac partition on boot. Reinstalled OSX. Lasted about an hour before a program froze, and then it turned gray and told me to hold down my power button to restart. Fine. About 5 seconds after pushing the power button to turn it back on, same thing. It keeps doing it. Reinstall OSX AGAIN. This time, I had to force quit a program that was frozen. Decided to restart just for good measure. Now, it goes all the way through boot up, "starting mac osx" and then goes to a blue screen with the round spinning thing. After about 20 seconds I get to a darwin prompt (???) asking me to log in. WHY? And it won't even take my login. I'm frustrated to all hell, and I'm beginning to think this was a $2900 waste of money....

Please help if you can...

Dan
 
dmurray14 said:
I'm not impressed. All these mac commercials boasting about how reliable the Mac is, and I've had to reinstall OSX TWO TIMES in the first 48 hours of owning it, now it looks like I have to do it again. First time the system froze and wouldn't find the mac partition on boot. Reinstalled OSX. Lasted about an hour before a program froze, and then it turned gray and told me to hold down my power button to restart. Fine. About 5 seconds after pushing the power button to turn it back on, same thing. It keeps doing it. Reinstall OSX AGAIN. This time, I had to force quit a program that was frozen. Decided to restart just for good measure. Now, it goes all the way through boot up, "starting mac osx" and then goes to a blue screen with the round spinning thing. After about 20 seconds I get to a darwin prompt (???) asking me to log in. WHY? And it won't even take my login. I'm frustrated to all hell, and I'm beginning to think this was a $2900 waste of money....

Please help if you can...

Dan
Click to expand...

What partition?
 
dmurray14 said:
I'm not impressed. All these mac commercials boasting about how reliable the Mac is, and I've had to reinstall OSX TWO TIMES in the first 48 hours of owning it, now it looks like I have to do it again. First time the system froze and wouldn't find the mac partition on boot. Reinstalled OSX. Lasted about an hour before a program froze, and then it turned gray and told me to hold down my power button to restart. Fine. About 5 seconds after pushing the power button to turn it back on, same thing. It keeps doing it. Reinstall OSX AGAIN. This time, I had to force quit a program that was frozen. Decided to restart just for good measure. Now, it goes all the way through boot up, "starting mac osx" and then goes to a blue screen with the round spinning thing. After about 20 seconds I get to a darwin prompt (???) asking me to log in. WHY? And it won't even take my login. I'm frustrated to all hell, and I'm beginning to think this was a $2900 waste of money....

Please help if you can...

Take it back, this is not the norm...

Dan
Click to expand...


Take it back, this is not the norm...
 
dmurray14 said:
I'm not impressed. All these mac commercials boasting about how reliable the Mac is, and I've had to reinstall OSX TWO TIMES in the first 48 hours of owning it, now it looks like I have to do it again. First time the system froze and wouldn't find the mac partition on boot. Reinstalled OSX. Lasted about an hour before a program froze, and then it turned gray and told me to hold down my power button to restart. Fine. About 5 seconds after pushing the power button to turn it back on, same thing. It keeps doing it. Reinstall OSX AGAIN. This time, I had to force quit a program that was frozen. Decided to restart just for good measure. Now, it goes all the way through boot up, "starting mac osx" and then goes to a blue screen with the round spinning thing. After about 20 seconds I get to a darwin prompt (???) asking me to log in. WHY? And it won't even take my login. I'm frustrated to all hell, and I'm beginning to think this was a $2900 waste of money....

Please help if you can...

Dan
Click to expand...

To be honest, this seems like a hardware problem. Could be a bad logic board, HD, Memory, any number of things. I'd take it into the store where you purchased it and ask for a replacement.

I've had 3-5 macs over my short "Apple" lifespan, and never have seen anything like this.
 
iGary said:
Unless he installed Boot Camp, which it sounds like he did.
Click to expand...

I did have boot camp installed, and I do now. But this also happened WITHOUT boot camp one of the times. Not thrilled at all. Just restarted it again and I got the login prompt with some stuff about joining my wireless network after it...what is going on?
 
The OS reinstalls are not the cause of the problem or the solution, merely the symptom. There is some other factor which we don't have enough information to offer advice on.

But it is like saying: My car keeps stalling. Every time it does, I have to change all four tires. I've changed tires three times and it's still not better.

Need to find the root cause.

I got the login prompt with some stuff about joining my wireless network after it...what is going on?
Click to expand...
Is this before or after you have logged in?

If before, Have you inadvertently set the machine to try to boot from a Network startup disk?

If after, it means you have the Airport card turned on and it is trying to identify and join a WiFi network - which is completly normal. If you don't have your own wireless network, it is probably detecting a neighbor's. In that case you should turn off Airport networking.
 
Well it seems like the first thing you might want to consider is just installing OS X from scratch, without Windows and see if the problem persists.
 
Do you have a USB ADSL modem attached?
I had similar problems as did a friend(although that was on Windows) when I attached the modem.

If not a modem is there anything else plugged in?
 
Lasted about an hour before a program froze, and then it turned gray and told me to hold down my power button to restart.

That definitely sounds like a kernel panic, usually caused by a hardware problem. I would definitely take it back and have it replaced. It's unfortunate that your first Mac owning experience has been a bad one thus far. However, Apple has great support and will set you up with a working piece of hardware.
 
dmurray14 said:
I did have boot camp installed, and I do now. But this also happened WITHOUT boot camp one of the times. Not thrilled at all. Just restarted it again and I got the login prompt with some stuff about joining my wireless network after it...what is going on?
Click to expand...

Here's what I'm getting

login: Jun 14 19:27:30 dan-murrays-computer /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Resources/airport: Error: WirelessAssociate2() = 88001006 for network wifi2
J
Jun 14 19:37:33 dan-murrays-computer mdsyncServer[149]: Could not create DiskArb session or approval session.
 
Call Apple or go directly back to the store you purchased from. And then update us.

As proud owner of something like 20 macs in my lifetime, never had this problem.
 
installed any 3rd party ram?
checked the S.M.A.R.T. staus of the Hard Drive?
there are more things to check too. before reinstalling the OS.
 
dmurray14 said:
I'm not impressed. All these mac commercials boasting about how reliable the Mac is, and I've had to reinstall OSX TWO TIMES in the first 48 hours of owning it, now it looks like I have to do it again. First time the system froze and wouldn't find the mac partition on boot. Reinstalled OSX. Lasted about an hour before a program froze, and then it turned gray and told me to hold down my power button to restart. Fine. About 5 seconds after pushing the power button to turn it back on, same thing. It keeps doing it. Reinstall OSX AGAIN. This time, I had to force quit a program that was frozen. Decided to restart just for good measure. Now, it goes all the way through boot up, "starting mac osx" and then goes to a blue screen with the round spinning thing. After about 20 seconds I get to a darwin prompt (???) asking me to log in. WHY? And it won't even take my login. I'm frustrated to all hell, and I'm beginning to think this was a $2900 waste of money....

Please help if you can...

Dan
Click to expand...

Demand a replacement. We have 3 20" Intel iMacs and not one of them has ever frozen since we got them, or done anything besides what we wanted it to do.
 
iGary said:
Well it seems like the first thing you might want to consider is just installing OS X from scratch, without Windows and see if the problem persists.
Click to expand...

Argh! I've done this, 2 times! I put Windows back on once, after everything was working. I am 99.99999% sure this has nothing to do with Windows, as it always happens after something goes wrong in OSX.

Maybe this information might help: After trying the reboot, it wasn't going anywhere when it booted up. I mean no where, and I let it sit for a while. So I held down the power key and restarted, and thats when I started getting the Darwin prompt.

mpw said:
Do you have a USB ADSL modem attached?
I had similar problems as did a friend(although that was on Windows) when I attached the modem.

If not a modem is there anything else plugged in?
Click to expand...

Nothing attached but the power cord...

PlaceofDis said:
installed any 3rd party ram?
checked the S.M.A.R.T. staus of the Hard Drive?
there are more things to check too. before reinstalling the OS.
Click to expand...

No 3rd party RAM. Again, this thing is barely two days old...
 
Just take it back, i mess my Mini up when i was installing RAM(i think i could have fixed one problem, the other was broken but i knew what i had it get to fix it) the took it in the back and said they were giving me a brand new one. I reinstalled the RAM, did not break anything and BAM loving my 1st intel Mac w/ ACD
 
dmurray14 said:
Argh! I've done this, 2 times! I put Windows back on once, after everything was working. I am 99.99999% sure this has nothing to do with Windows, as it always happens after something goes wrong in OSX.

Maybe this information might help: After trying the reboot, it wasn't going anywhere when it booted up. I mean no where, and I let it sit for a while. So I held down the power key and restarted, and thats when I started getting the Darwin prompt.
Click to expand...

So have you run the system with JUST OS X (no Windows) for any period of time?
 
iGary said:
So have you run the system with JUST OS X (no Windows) for any period of time?
Click to expand...

Yes, I believe the second time it happened it was just OSX
 
There are others with similar wireless problems on the MBPs here's a thread at Apple.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=389962

and one here

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/184416/

Have you tried turning off the wireless altogether for a while and seeing if it doesn't kernel panic. The second thing you have there seems related to mounting a hdd partition. So this would help you isolate the problem to wireless.

I'll repeat what others have said, this is not the norm, but is also not super-uncommon. Take it back and request one that works.

B
 
OK so I just put in the OSX install disk and, for ***** and giggles, ran the disk utility, and tried to repair permissions and then the disk. Here's what happened:

Verify and Repair Disk "Macintosh HD"
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Keys out of order.
Rebuilding Catalog B-tree.
The volume Macintosh HD could not be repaired.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit

1 HFS Volume Checked
1 Volume could not be repaired because of an error
Repair attempted on 1 volume
1 volume could not be repaired

I also want to ask again - is it bad to be holding down the power button to restart when the computer appears frozen?
 
medea said:
Did the computer work before you installed bootcamp and windows?
Click to expand...

Yes, and it worked with bootcamp too. I see no correlation between the Windows install and the crashing, but I do see a correlation between OSX and the crashing. It always gets messed up like this after OSX takes a nose dive and I have to restart. My question is, am I not supposed to hold down the power button if it is frozen? Could this be doing it? If so, what am I supposed to do? I am not going to sit and wait for it to think about unfreezing...

And I should say Windows continued to work every time this happened...

Now heres the thing about bringing it back - if I do return it, I don't want to leave my data on it. I would rather return it with a freshly installed OSX rather than with all my personal data inside. Are they going to need to see a broken one for me to exchange it?

Dan
 
dmurray14 said:
Yes, and it worked with bootcamp too. I see no correlation between the Windows install and the crashing, but I do see a correlation between OSX and the crashing. It always gets messed up like this after OSX takes a nose dive and I have to restart. My question is, am I not supposed to hold down the power button if it is frozen? Could this be doing it? If so, what am I supposed to do? I am not going to sit and wait for it to think about unfreezing...

And I should say Windows continued to work every time this happened...
Click to expand...

Well in order to get relief at Apple, you will need to duplicate these issues with a fresh OS X install. So as much as you can't see the correlation, it doesn't really matter...do a fresh OS X install, do not install Windows. Period.

Then see if you still have issues.
 
iGary said:
Well in order to get relief at Apple, you will need to duplicate these issues with a fresh OS X install. So as much as you can't see the correlation, it doesn't really matter...do a fresh OS X install, do not install Windows. Period.

Then see if you still have issues.
Click to expand...

Makes sense. I'll re-install OSX and work with that for a little and see what happens.

Thanks,
Dan
 
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