Acard 6280M and Tiger = BOOM!

I have solved my hanging gray Apple screen of death issue referenced earlier many times on this blog (most recently here - follow the trail yourself back to Jan 9, 2006 when I tried to upgrade from Panther to Tiger 10.4.4 on my relatively old, but heavily upgraded, G4 AGP.

In my last post, I had discovered on the Apple discussion boards information about the Acard PCI Adapter interfering with versions of Tiger after 10.4.2. I figured this was likely my problem as well, as I have that very PCI card and was attempting to boot Tiger off of a drive connected to that Acard adapter.

It so happened that I had a fairly large 120 GB drive still attached to the main ATA bus on the system, so I duplicated my Tiger partition over to that drive. I’ve been cruising along fine since in Tiger 10.4.5. I also emailed Acard the following regarding this issue:

Dear Acard,

I have recently upgraded from Panther to Tiger (10.4.5) and may be having issues with my Acard 6280M. I have loaded the most recent drivers, but the problem still remains.

If I do any system maintenance (cache deletion) or add any new kernel extension, I will get stuck at the Apple gray startup screen. I have to do a safe-boot and then delete the following folder to be able to boot again:

/System/Library/Cache/com.apple.kernelcache/

I perused the file inside that directory and found a line referencing the 6280M. Are there any issues with the current driver and Tiger 10.4.5?

Thank you...

Shane Hendricks

Acard hasn’t yet responded and they may never respond; the current broken driver is version 1.5.7. This driver should work fine with 10.4.2 and below. They did answer some folks on the Apple discussion regarding this topic, which you can read for yourself. They basically passed the buck to Apple, which is bogus. It’s Acard’s responsibility (as a peripheral maker) to support Apple, not the other way around damn it. In another answer, they recommended doing a complete new reinstall and AVOIDING MIGRATING OR UPGRADING from Panther, which is crap for those of us with a nice running Panther system.

Anyway, this problem is solved for me, and my system seems to be running much better under Tiger. Good luck to others with this problem.

More on SystemStarter and gray Apple screen

The plot thickens. Reference, of course, my previous posts on this subject here.

I had narrowed the culprit down specifically to /System/Library/Caches/, which seems to somehow become corrupt after some major system maintenance or modification (i.e., install of a new kernel extension or cache clean up) on my old G4 AGP (Sawtooth).

Some others on the Apple forums had suggested it could possibly be due to my Acard 6280M IDE PCI adapter, which I MAY have ruled out by updating to the latest driver (version 1.5.7.); I’m not 100% sure. I did have some troubles updating to the new Acard driver, but I eventually got it working as well as the previous version of the Acard driver I was using.

However, after reinstalling (once again) Tiger 10.4.5 from the backup I had made and migrating (again, avoiding the root files and folders--which I no longer believe is related to the problem), I installed Applejack and proceeded to clean all the caches in single-user mode to test for problem reproducibility. The system rebooted fine after the Applejack session, but I immediately rebooted again from the Finder and experienced the hang at the gray Apple screen.

Since I had narrowed the problem to /System/Library/Caches/, I decided to go through the contents systematically to find the culprit file or folder. As Murphy’s Law would have it, the very last folder I deleted (after many reboots, gray screens, and safe boots to delete files) was this folder:

/System/Library/Caches/com.apple.kernelcaches/

After deleting this folder, the system booted normally, so I may need to delete this folder after every kernel extension install or system maintenance that involves cache cleaning.

What fun! This obviously MUST be related to my hardware setup in some way, but I don’t know which part for the life of me (maybe it is the Acard, but I can’t understand why). I do have these system.log messages (the first of which I always had in Panther but never had any real issues booting):

Mar 5 09:51:04 localhost kernel[0]: WARNING: ATA Drive claims FLUSH CACHE EXT feature support but does not claim Extended LBA feature support

The above message obviously directly involved the Acard adapter.

Mar 5 09:51:04 localhost kernel[0]: Extension "com.apple.driver.PioneerSuperDrive" has no kernel dependency

The next message listed above is a new one for me. No clue...

So there’s obviously some issue with hardware, because my Mac Mini doesn’t behave this way on Tiger (and obviously for most of the Apple world). My old AGP has been so heavily upgraded that it may no longer be capable of running newer OSs (likely issues with either the Acard or my Giga Designs Dual Processor upgrade card).

Anyway, at least I’ve narrowed it down some to a kernel issue with some part of the hardware.

SystemStarter woes continue...

Nope...problem not gone.

Reference my previous posts here and here about this issue I’ve faced upgrading my old G4 AGP to Tiger and getting the weird, unpredictable, hanging gray-Apple-screen-of-frozen-death, which I’ve traced to SystemStarter in the console.

I’ve narrowed the culprit files down to something in the /System/Library/Cache/, as today I decided to delete recommended items stepwise in Safe Boot until I could boot normally again.

First, I tried deleting a few things in /Library/Cache that I thought might be the culprit, going simply by the date of modification/crreation (i.e., today). No help. So then I tried getting rid of Extensions.kextcache alone, but I still faced the screen-of-death.

So finally, I just deleted the entire contents of /System/Library/Cache, and this seems to be the cause (or something in here).

As far as what’s causing this: I’m not sure. I had a crash shortly before this happened and I ran Applejack. Reboot was fine, but a subsequent test restart was not.

BTW, here’s a great site for troubleshooting startup: http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/startupitems.html

Searching the Apple Discussion boards led me to this thread, which might be related to my problems (i.e. the Acard 6280M IDE PCI controller).

To be continued I’m sure...?