Black Cat: Troubles Major, Minor, Solved and Unsolved By Francine Schwieder

Panther has had some really major problems, but for some reason the worst of them never bit me--a happy change from Jaguar--so I've loved Panther from the very beginning and have had to boot in older Xs only a couple of times. Indeed, I booted up Jaguar the other day to check something out and found I was just as unhappy as I am on those rare occasions I need to boot in OS 9. But Panther, especially since the 10.3.2 upgrade and the ancillary Security updates, has not been exactly trouble free, not even for me. So forthwith here is a list of Panther Problems, with solutions where they are known, that have affected me or significant numbers of other people.

Before you even install Panther there is an important thing to do if you have a firewire drive: check with the drive manufacturer for a firmware update, install it, shutdown and unplug the drive. Next install Panther and download and install the 10.3.1 update. Now you can go back to using your firewire drive normally. There was a huge incompatiblity between Panther and certain firewire drives that resulted in catastrophic data loss. You've been warned.

As long as you are checking for firmware updates, make sure you verify that you have all the latest firmware updates for your particular computer, and its innards, that are available from Apple and from the manufacturer of any other hardware, such as a video card, and that the hardware is all compatible with Panther. You'll be glad you did. Some who didn't ended up with unbootable machines and no easy way to go backwards. Some people with certain video cards in older laptops get nothing but a black screen of death when they try to boot. So don't upgrade until you check around and make sure it will work with your computer/hardware configuration.

After installing through at least the 10.3.1 update, and whether you go to 10.3.2 is up to you (I'm not giving it a blanket recommendation yet, nor recommending the Security Updates either, for that matter), it is time to launch Disk Utility and Repair Permissions. You'll discover that after it finally gets everything repaired, if you run it again, everything is STILL repaired. Another bug from Jaguar squashed.

You may also notice that Disk Utility looks different somehow. That's because Apple decided to abolish Disk Copy and roll it into Disk Utility, a sort of one stop Disk Shop. Maybe they thought we were confused by having two programs that began with the word Disk. Whatever the reason it is a done deal, and they seem to have Great Plans for the future. In the present however things are not all that great. I asked for Roxio Toast for Xmas because Things Just Don't Work Right. Until now I have been perfectly happy with burning in the Finder and using Disk Copy. No more.

CDs, DVDs and DMG files: You'll notice that you now create a new disk image and burn it from here. You may also notice when you put a blank CD in your third party drive that nothing whatsoever happens, or if you are using iTunes to make a music CD you may get strange messages and be unable to burn. It may be that your drive isn't supported. For a list of supported drives, check HERE. A stranger problem involves making multisession CDs, especially if you are expecting to get not separate volumes, but add to what is already there. Evidently Apple is planning to add this functionality, or so a non-updated Help entry led one to believe. Following the directions led to a truly weird CD that would mount but be invisible to the Finder. You could see it with the Terminal, use the Terminal to open files on the CD, but the Finder seemed to be oblivious to its existence. The current directions, which seem excessively convoluted to me, will result in a CD that will mount multiple volumes in the Finder, one for each session, although you may have to eject it after you burn and reinsert it to get it to mount. As for making ISO 9660 CDs... Well, I gave up and begged Santa Claus for a copy of Toast, which works just the way you would expect a Mac program to work. Easy to use, intuitive, simple interface. I advise you to do the same.

A truly strange problem showed up in the 10.3.1 upgrade. People who had not mounted a DMG file when they were at 10.3 found they were now unable to do so. Evidently they used the Software Update program immediately, rather than waiting for the stand-alone installer, and then downloading and mounting that updater in 10.3. Many people have gotten better results when updating OS X by downloading and using combo updaters rather than running Software Update. If you choose the Software Update route, be sure you mount some .dmg file in 10.3 before updating to 10.3.1.

Finally, on the DVD front, I ran into a problem attempting to backup my functioning Panther to DVDs. I made 3 expensive DVD coasters. Fortunately I got DVD media for Xmas as well as Toast. I discovered that Toast will simply freeze when it runs into a permission problem, as it certainly will when you are trying to copy system files. So what I did was use the Disk Utility to make a blank DVD disk image, then copied all the Panther folders to the disk image, and when asked gave my password to authorize this transgression. When I tried to use Disk Utility to make this Disk Image into a DVD I got my third coaster (it failed verification, don't know why). So I then simply burned the Disk Image file, as a file (backup.dmg) to a DVD using Toast. That worked. Double-clicking the backup.dmg file on the DVD mounts it in the Finder and I can access the files. This process requires a LOT of free space somewhere to store the disk image. After you burn it and check to make sure it is OK you can then toss the disk image file.

Slow Startup: Lots and lots of people complained that Panther was very slow to start up, seemed to sit there doing nothing instead of presenting them with a login window or the desktop. Turns out someone forgot to include a file in the right place for the start process to find it. You can fix this with the Terminal. Go to Applications, the Utilities folder, and launch Terminal. Then type this:

sudo cp /System/Library/Extensions/BootCache.kext/Contents/Resources/BootCacheControl /usr/sbin

Please note there are spaces between sudo and cp and /System...Control and /usr/sbin. If you haven't run Terminal and/or a sudo command before you will be asked for your password and issued a warning about respecting the privacy of others. When you type your password it is NOT echoed to the screen, so type carefully and hit return. Then reboot twice. The solution was origninally posted to the Apple Discussions by Steven Minnick. Nico Rohrback wrote an AppleScript Studio application to do this for you if the Terminal makes you nervous.

File Vault: People had a disaster with the first incarnation of File Vault. They were asked at some point if they would like to recover some disk space. Who wouldn't? Of course they clicked OK. Whereupon the contents of their home folder became irreparably mangled. Supposedly this has been fixed with the update, but I'm still seeing File Vault problems posted to Apple Discussions. Unless you have a compelling reason for enabling it, don't. And if you do have a reason, check the Discussions for the problems people are having first.

Freezes: The symptoms are distinctive. You are working along, everything seems fine, you do something very normal, such as Save As, and you get a spinning beachball. Everything else seems to be working normally. You decide your program, or the Finder itself, has simply hung. You hit Command-Option-Escape expecting to be able to Force Quit. The box for Force Quit appears, but it doesn't work. You try relaunching the Finder. That doesn't work either. Pretty soon everything is hopelessly hung, the Finder may have disappeared entirely and not reappeared, and you resort to the barbarous expedient of pressing the reset button, or some variant of that tactic, to restart the computer. If, when the beachball first appears, you do nothing at all, just let the computer sit there while you get up and do some stretching exercises or get a cup of coffee, eventually the beachball will stop spinning and it will finish whatever you told it to do, then behave as if nothing had happened. The amount of time varies from incident to incident. You can then save all your work and restart, until it happens again.

Thus far the cause and cure of the problem are unknown. If you have Activity Monitor running, and don't mind losing unsaved changes, you can sometimes manage to Force Quit from there, if you are persistent. And if you have Terminal running you can restart using this command: sudo shutdown -r now.

Some people believe that a router may be the problem. Others that something in networking is to blame. Some believe deep cleaning the caches using Panther Cache Cleaner solved their problem. Wouldn't hurt to try.

iDisk and Mirror Agent: Personally, I've become suspicious of Mirror Agent. If you have an iDisk you may have discovered the new Panther feature that allows you to make a copy of your iDisk to your local hard drive, and then automatically updates the iDisk when you make changes to the files on the local copy. Pretty nifty feature if it actually worked right. It doesn't. The first time I set it to make a local copy on my G4, with a broadband connection, it took 5 hours to copy and synchronize 33MBs. When I tried it with my iBook it took 18 hours and 20 minutes (I went to bed, when I got up it had finally finished). But that isn't the end of the problems. The synchronization is accomplished by an always running process called Mirror Agent. You can see it if you launch Activity Monitor. If you have automatic sync enabled the Mirror Agent can run at any time, and this can cause you to get the spinning beachball in Finder for no apparent, to you, reason. And if it happens to be running when you try to logout, shutdown or restart you will be unable to do that thing. Even if you have selected manual sync you can run into slow shutdowns, and perhaps other cases of the spinning beachball as well. Several people have reported getting the beachball when trying to save a file in Photoshop, with sync on manual, and not having the problem at all with Mirror Agent disabled. I've decided to try shutting down Mirror Agent as soon as I get logged in, and only let it run if I intend to sync my iDisk, and quit it as soon as I finish. Since beginning this procedure I have not had any of the strange freezes. To quit Mirror Agent launch Acitivity Monitor, organize by Process Name, scroll until you get to Mirror Agent, double-click and then click the Quit button (Force Quit should not be necessay).

My advice is to not enable this feature. One of these days it will work right. Maybe--I'm very dubious of Apple's implementation of WebDAV, I don't think it has ever worked right, still doesn't, and I'm not optimistic about the future. Just access your iDisk the old fashioned way, through the Go menu.

Safari, Help Viewer, iApps and Fonts: Perhaps related to the above is what someone termed the "Safari staring into space" bug. You tell Safari to go somewhere. The little blue connection visual aid appears in the address bar and moves about an inch. Down at the bottom it says it is Contacting "http://www.someplace.com" and that's it. Nothing further happens. No error messages, nada. It just sits there, staring into space. Things can go from bad to worse from this point on. The first time it happened to me I ended up having to push the reset button to restart the computer (and the first partition of my firewire drive disappeared, just like the Jaguar kernel panics described in Jaguar Problems). I had to restart in 10.1.5 to get it back. The next time Safari stared vacantly into space I hastily quit the program, then relaunched and it was fine. Hasn't happened since I took to disabling Mirror Agent, which may be coincidental. Other people have repaired their Safari problem by discarding the Times RO font. Still others got relief by going to Safari Preferences and changing the fonts to Geneva 14 and Courier 14 (mine had been set to those fonts, but size 12).

All the Apple applications are extremely picky about, and sensitive to, fonts. If you have used Font Book, or manually added or deleted fonts, you could get a nasty surprise next time you launch Safari or Help, or Address Book or Mail.... You get the idea. So if a suite of your Apple apps won't work it is probably a font problem. If you have removed or diabled anything in the System/Fonts folder undo what you did. The Helvetica font seems implicated quite frequently. Address Book won't work right if you have the Helvetica Fraction font installed and enabled. If you have your own versions of Helvetica and Helvetica Neue fonts installed, they can conflict with the dfont versions installed by Apple. Too many fonts can lead to problems, as can a corrupt font. If you suspect you have a problem with fonts, or with Font Book, take thyself to the Apple Discussions and do a search.

Icon Follies: You can now give your home folder a custom icon. Custom icons on folders dragged into the Sidebar may not show as other than generic until you restart. Hard drive icons on the desktop can reposition themselves in disconcerting ways, including piling up on top of each other in the lower right corner. Go to the View menu, Show View Options, and experiment with the settings. Try Keep Arranged by name, and/or snap to grid. If you do a Find that returns a number of items, the icons may not appear next to the items in a timely way. It may be annoying or alarming, but it doesn't actually hurt anything. (Far more annoying is that I frequently can NOT get it to stop a search).

Drag and Drop On the Desktop: Many people are having a problem when they select multiple items on the desktop and attempt to move them. It seems to be associated with having the desktop's View Options set to display both item info and icon preview. My Finder doesn't seem to have this problem. If yours does try turning those options off from the View menu (hit Command-j, then uncheck one or both the boxes).

Get Info Errors: Sometimes when you choose a folder and do Get Info, or select multiple items in a folder, then do Get Info on them to check the aggregate size, then remove or add something, the Finder will not update the size in the Get Info box. If you select Inspector, that will have the new size, but it sometimes won't update after further changes either. And often the number just seems wrong. Sometimes when you select a folder it says it is calculating the size, but never finishes. Move up or down the hierarchy, then return to where you want and try again. Often the number immediately appears after doing this. And just to confound things, sometimes it all seems to work just fine. This can be pretty annoying if you are trying to set-up to burn a CD. If you use Roxio Toast you can depend on the figures it returns for the size.

Disk Full Errors: You've got a 10GB disk with 2GBs free. You are working happily along when you get a message that the disk is full. What happened? First off, don't try to ignore it, things will just get worse. Try quitting programs you are not using and then save your work in the program you are using. Then restart. You've got your 2GBs back. Until it happens again. What seems to be going on is that some program, and often it seems to be the browser (both Safari and Netscape have been implicated), has developed a problem much like a memory leak, only instead of using all your RAM, it is gloming onto swap space. Every program gets allocated a certain amount of Virtual Memory to be used for swap files, which are located on your hard drive. Programs are also writing logs and cache files, and may have a bunch of temporary files as well (Photoshop can have huge collections of temp files). These things all take disk space and can fill a couple of GBs, even though you haven't saved anything. Then, as far as the system is concerned, your disk has no more free space. When you restart, temporary files and swap files are all cleared out, and you get your space back. You can try launching Activity Monitor and keep an eye on things such as System Memory, Disk Activity and Disk Usage. You may notice some program doing something strange.

If you are adventurous you can use the Go menu's Go To Folder to check the contents of /var/vm. I usually have but a single swap file in there, swapfile0, size 64MBs. If you have several swapfiles, and they have large sizes, then you do indeed have a program that is leaking memory. DO NOT TRY TO DELETE THESE FILES! The only safe way to remove them is to restart. Then start trying to figure out which program is the culprit.

Another possiblity for disappearing disk space is some program generating huge log files. To check this launch Console (it is in your Applications/Utilities folder) and click on the Logs icon in the tool bar. It is safe to manually delete log files if you find a batch using large amounts of space. One person had something returning an error message to its log file every second. I had a piece of hardware returning an error message every few seconds to the Console log file.

There are a couple of programs that can help you clean up your drive and reclaim space. One is OmniDiskSweeper. It is shareware, although you can use a slightly crippled version for free. It will show you the sizes of everything, ranked conveniently. If you use it, do not just toss things unless you know FOR CERTAIN what the thing is, what put it there, and why. People sometimes toss the contents of their /Library/Receipts folder, and then discover that Repair Permissions won't work. Panther Cache Cleaner will safely clean out your bloated cache files. And MacJanitor, which is free, will run all those little UNIX jobs, which are scheduled to run in the middle of the night, at a time of your choosing. Running them can also result in a little more free space, and it is a Good Thing to get them done anyway.

OS X, because of the system requirements for caches, logs, swap files, temp files and writing directory information as you move and save things, requires a hefty amount of free space on your drive. Most people seem to think you need a minimum of 10 to 15% free, with 20% being a good idea if you have that much to spare. You can get serious problems with less than 10% free. You may first notice that your preferences are disappearing. More serious problems pop up after that. So if you have a 60GB drive you should have at least 6GBs free, and 12GBs would be safer.

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