Involuntary Reboot Log
I had a couple of these saved up, but now that I've just had another kernel panic I think it's time to catch up on the backlog of the Involuntary Reboot Log.
#26: Hard reset
- Operating system version: 10.5.2
- Uptime at moment of failure(s): not sure
Ever since upgrading to Leopard my SuperDrive hasn't been the same. In 10.5.0 inserting a disc was enough to guarantee an eventual lock-up of some sort, things seemed a little better in 10.5.1, and recently I decided to try out my luck with 10.5.2, but it seems things are no better.
I had been watching a DVD for about half an hour when I had to pause it and leave the room. On returning I couldn't resume playback, the player said it was "skipping damaged parts", none of the controls worked, and when I tried to quit I got the dreaded beachball.
Then the keyboard stopped responding and the clock froze for about three-and-a-half minutes. When it finally came back to life I tried to reboot. From 14:18 to 14:30 I was watching a blank desktop with a spinning progress indicator. At 14:30 the progress indicator stopped and just over an hour later I decided to give up and pull the plug.
Upon rebooting Mail.app wouldn't launch but luckily I was able to repair the corruption as described in "Fixing corrupt SQLite database files in Mail.app".
#27: Kernel panic
- Operating system version: 10.5.2
- Uptime at moment of failure(s): not sure
This kernel panic happened several hours into an export from Final Cut Pro, and similar to last time Mail.app wouldn't launch after rebooting (but unlike last time simply retrying a few times was enough to "cure" it).
#28: Kernel panic
- Operating system version: 10.5.2
- Uptime at moment of failure(s): several days
Another kernel panic when the machine was under heavy load. A zillion apps open and lots of work in progress (luckily almost all of it saved to disk, I just hope nothing got corrupted but it is too early to say). Curiously, whenever my machine panics I never get a panic log with any diagnostic information.
I'll definitely be continuing with my daily whole-disk backups to an external volume (done with SuperDuper!) and my two-hourly home dir backups (done with tar and bzip from cron, also to an external volume).
Stats to date
- Kernel panics: 9
- Hard resets: 19
- Total failures: 28
- Start of recording keeping: 21 May 2006
- Total days to date: 647 days
- Average time between failures: 24.07 days
This iMac is definitely the most unreliable Apple machine I've ever owned. The average time between failures has been trending slowly downwards for months now, and is already considerably worse than the average I had on my last machine (about 30 days between failures).