Macbook problem

gamerman4

gamerman4

Active Member
Ok my teacher's daughter has a Macbook that crashes on her randomly (it turns off.) I'm doing some basic diagnostics right now and was wondering if OSX keeps a log similar to the Windows Event Viewer. The Disk Utility says the Mac HD needs to be repaired but I was kinda wondering why so any clue?

I'm sure tlarkin knows :P

Also, in the Disk Util. the "repair disk" option is greyed out. I assume I need to use a boot disk for repair and I was wondering if there was any free way to get a disk that would let me do this.
 
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It logs all system events into

/var/log/system.log

can you create a new user account and try that and see if the crashes persist?
 
Well I assume a new user wouldn't matter since the disk is reporting error.
Here is what it says:

The volume Macintosh HD needs to be repaired.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit.


1 HFS volume checked
Volume needs repair

Also, she said it occurs seemingly at random so I can't just reproduce it at will.
 
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do you have access to this machine? You can boot it into single user mode and run a fsck on it?

I gotta run out for a bit I will check back later
 
She let me borrow it so I have full access to it until Friday.

EDIT: ok went and ran "fsck -f" and it went through some checking and ended up saying "Macintosh HD was repaired successfully" so I assume its fixed. She said it turns off mostly when she is ripping CDs and running an anti-virus scan on it so I figured it would be a disk problem.
 
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gamerman4 said:
She let me borrow it so I have full access to it until Friday.

EDIT: ok went and ran "fsck -f" and it went through some checking and ended up saying "Macintosh HD was repaired successfully" so I assume its fixed. She said it turns off mostly when she is ripping CDs and running an anti-virus scan on it so I figured it would be a disk problem.
Click to expand...

did you do it through single user mode?

I guess you need to reproduce the error if you can.

Also, open up a terminal and try something like this:

Code: 
cat /var/log/system.log | grep disk

Try replacing disk with other key words that may pull up specific errors to the volume. Then copy/paste them
 
well im running the virus scan through every file, she said it always turned off in the middle of a scan so im going to scan it completely and see if it works.

I did do the scan through single-user mode, it scanned, showed some progress info (checking this...checking that...etc..)
 
gamerman4 said:
well im running the virus scan through every file, she said it always turned off in the middle of a scan so im going to scan it completely and see if it works.

I did do the scan through single-user mode, it scanned, showed some progress info (checking this...checking that...etc..)
Click to expand...

Cool, did you mount the root volume as read/write in SUM? If not that fsck was read only and probably didn't fix anything.
 
gamerman4 said:
no, but considering it no longer says the disk is damaged, i imagine it did do something.
Click to expand...

Well, it isn't suppose to work like that because you are logged in as root but read only for safety reasons. Which is why you have to mount the root volume as read/write for it to work.

What version of OS X does it have?
 
Did you flag a fsck in the OS for next boot up? Otherwise I can't see how fsck would fix anything if it couldn't write to the drive.

Hmm, I just re-read Apple's white page on fsck...seems it can run with out being mounted as read/write....

and it looks like it will mount the volumes according to the /etc/fstab, so I guess since your root volume is probably flagged as read/write in there it mounts it as that in SUM.

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man8/fsck.8.html
 
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