How do I Decode a Problem Report?!

[carguyty]

Quick Stats:

Power Mac G4 MDD FW800

1.42 DP

2 GB Ram

OS X 10.4.11

The Problem: Every single game I try to install from disk fails to load after a successful install.

Seriously! Halo: Combat Evolved (both PPC and Universal), Return to Castle Wolfenstein, True Crime, Max Payne...ALL BUMS! I'm mostly concerned about Halo because...well, Halo. Now I get that the download may be corrupted (download the images, burn to disk), but the Universal Binary works fine on the i7 MacBook Air, which should mean the image as well as the product serial are both intact. Wolfenstein is just as bothersome, however, because it was NIB!

When I go to the Problem Report, the two applications refer to "Thread 0 crashed with PPC Thread State 64:" and they make references to Core libraries. Tiger is a clean install from DVD without anything third party and only the software updates being run. 

Is there a place that maybe explains how to break down the report and spot the errant component? 

 

[Cory5412]

My strategy is basically to google for text from the errors.

Do any other applications do this? I searched around and the only thing I could find was a bunch of references that say sometimes apps crash this way, ableton and indesign were mentioned specifically, but one person managed to crash grep in this manner as well. No responses on most threads about this issue.

In the case of grep, nothing conclusive ever came of it. Some people said to test the RAM (so, it couldn't hurt to do that) and the original poster eventually said something about just giving up on the system they were using for the task at hand.

Some further discussion suggests that these messages are being generated by a bug in the Crash Reporter, so one thing you might do is if you can reinstall and either not do updates or install 10.4.7 or 10.4.8 instead of 10.4.9 (or perhaps move forward to 10.5 or backward to 10.3) see if it behaves any differently. If it does the same thing in different versions of the OS, then it's likely a hardware problem somewhere. I would start with RAM because it's one of the cheapest and easiest to test, then consider putting another video card in if you have one.

 

[carguyty]

My strategy is basically to google for text from the errors.

[...]

If it does the same thing in different versions of the OS, then it's likely a hardware problem somewhere. I would start with RAM because it's one of the cheapest and easiest to test, then consider putting another video card in if you have one.

I feel like that's going to start to be a recurring theme in these machines, eh?

A-What's it doing?

B-Well I plug in the keyboard and this happens

*Water pours out of the speakers*

A-Let's try swapping the RAM

I kid, but the wild behavior in this machine is something else. When it came to me, I found the fan seized up on the GeForce Ti and gave it some love. The old bag of bits breathed to life and I felt all was good and grand in the world. TenFourFox, installed without a hitch. A few of the basic utilities I run around the lab are chooching along just happy. Must be a grand piece of kit!

The games are the first "heavy" item that I've tried to put into action. What if, like you suggested, the RAM is to blame? The RAM on the video card could have been partly cooked in whatever caused the fan to have trouble breathing. I'm going to of course start with the easy DDR system RAM, but I'm also going to go dig out the spare GeForce just in case.

I'll report back what I find. I've seen that Crash Reporter bug before. Would be super cool if (one day, Hopper willing) if some of the engineers on the early OS stages would come forward with stories and anecdotes on why they did things the way they did. Little bits have leaked out from the pre-PPC days. The decade post-1994 would be a great set of stories!

 

[Byrd]

Have you tried another optical drive (assuming you're installing from CD media) and/or hard disk?

 

[Cory5412]

If you don't believe that the RAM is at all at fault, then my next suggestion is to try something else that will tax the system and use the RAM heavily and see how that behaves. A large Blender render or something like running Cinebench might do this too.

SOme of the information I found online suggests that this was a known bug in some versions of Mac OS X, in like the 10.4.7/8/9 era. If you believe you're seeing this erroneously, then your next troubleshooting step should probably be to get onto a different patch level of the OS, like 10.4.2, or even move all the way back to 10.3 or forward to 10.5.

When googling for strings in that error text, RAM was the only possible suspect, but yes, it was presented very casually without any hard evidence, especially since these error messages basically presume that there is an error in either the OS or the app, and doesn't do any checking of the hardware. Start-up RAM tests aren't perfect, though.

 

[carguyty]

Thank you for responding, everybody. I'm sorry I haven't got back.

Update: RAM and video card change show no difference in behavior.

I hate saying things like "known good RAM" when we can't test anything more than electrical connections or use built in memtest. This leaves out possibilities of sympathetic electrical activity or pipeline degredation. But that's on the assumption that memtests only check for address returns. what do I know?

At any rate...I pulled matching RAM and video card from another MDD and tried to launch Halo. Nothing different. I haven't looked at the log yet. Time management is as illusive to me as RAM faults. But I'm doubtful of a hardware issue at this point. Oh well! Soldering on...

 

[Cory5412]

Do you have a PC? You could put the RAM in it and run memtest86 on it that way. The RAM would then definitively become known good RAM.

Regardless, having swapped those things out, it's probably a software problem.

I googled some of the text from your problem report, the only things I could find suggested it was a bug in the OS, meaning it may be necessary to reinstall and get to a different patch level, or move to a different major version (10.3 or 10.5, for example.)

Idly, does Halo run on that other MDD? What is its OS configuration like? Just for fun, what if you put this boot disk into that system?